Little Lulu #260

History

By 1980, Western Publishing — which had operated the Little Lulu comic franchise since creator Marge Buell sold her rights to the company upon retirement — was a company under significant financial strain, having been acquired by Mattel in 1979 after years of falling profits. The Whitman imprint, which Western had owned since acquiring Hamming-Whitman Publishing in 1915, became the sole brand on late-series issues as Gold Key wound down. Issue #260 was produced with writer Arnold Drake and artist Irving Tripp — the same creative pairing documented across surrounding issues in the late 1970s and early 1980s — but rather than entering normal newsstand channels, it was sealed into low-quantity shrink-wrapped three-packs sold through department stores, toy shops, drug stores, and dime stores, a distribution method that was erratic by the publisher's own admission and that left no reliable print-run records behind.

Trivia · 7 facts

• Published September 1980 by Western Publishing Company under the Whitman imprint — not the Gold Key brand used for earlier issues in the same series.
• Written by Arnold Drake and illustrated by Irving Tripp, the creative team documented on surrounding late-series issues; Tripp had been the title's primary artist since 1949 and remained a Dell/Western staff artist until his retirement in 1982.
• Never distributed through newsstands; available exclusively as part of low-print-run shrink-wrapped three-comic multi-packs sold at a limited group of non-traditional retail outlets including department stores, toy shops, and drug stores.
• Issue #260 is identified by series historians and collector databases (including Key Collector Comics and michelesworld.net's dedicated series chronology) as the rarest issue in the entire Little Lulu run.
• The Little Lulu comic series — which began as Dell's Four Color appearances in the 1940s before graduating to its own title in 1948 — ultimately concluded with issue #268 in 1984, with the last few issues appearing under the Whitman name as Western discontinued publishing comics.
• The character of Little Lulu (Lulu Moppet) originated in a single-panel Saturday Evening Post strip created by Marjorie Henderson Buell on February 23, 1935, giving the franchise a 45-year publication history by the time this issue appeared.
• No story synopsis is indexed for this specific issue in the Grand Comics Database, and Key Collector Comics likewise lists no synopsis — meaning its interior content remains less documented than its distribution history.

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