The comic series Little Lulu, created in 1935 by Marjorie Henderson Buell, better known as Marge, is a foundational work in American comics history, as it features one of the medium’s first heroines. The series not only subverted gender norms but also achieved great commercial and critical success. Marge, as a pioneer of women-created comics, successfully penetrated the predominantly male sphere of mainstream comics, quickly expanding beyond newspapers into a wide range of merchandise, despite the pervasive sexism that she, and her contemporaries, faced.
In an unprecedented exploration at the intersection of BD (as both Bande Dessinée and Big Data), Ilan Manouach’s latest conceptual book compiles all crowd scenes from Little Lulu, offering a panoramic view of crowds through the lens of one of the most influential media of the 20th and 21st centuries. As both a sponge and mirror of its sociocultural environment, comics have long been recognized as one of the mass media most capable of shaping and reflecting the values and ideologies of their time. Lu X not only concentrates human realities such as love, hate, humor, fertility, or aggression, but also contains the cultural zeitgeist, the spirit of its time, as a “total social phenomenon.”
The conceptual relevance of Lu X is deeply rooted in the work of researchers on crowd movement, mass popular movements, and the rise of fascism in post-war Europe. Gabriel Tarde’s notion of imitation as a primary social process is strikingly illustrated by the uniformity of collective behaviors in Lulu’s world. Gustave Le Bon’s description of the crowd as a singular entity susceptible to certain ideas, particularly during the rise of fascism, finds an echo in the representation of mass movements and public assemblies in the comic. Elias Canetti’s ideas about the psychological foundations of crowds, particularly their tendency to grow and create a sense of equality among their members, are reflected in the masses that are both varied and unified depicted in the series.
The Lu book series represents an exploration of comics as machine-interpretable information systems. By focusing specifically on crowd scenes in Little Lulu, Manouach’s work engages with how computational systems can extract, classify, and interpret visual information from comics. Using machine learning algorithms, the project demonstrates how comics can be deconstructed into data points that machines can process—panel structures, character arrangements, crowd densities, and compositional patterns become quantifiable elements that can be clustered according to various criteria such as visual similarity, temporal sequence, or narrative function. This computational approach reveals entirely new taxonomies invisible to traditional human reading—patterns of collective behavior representation that emerge only when hundreds of crowd scenes are analyzed simultaneously by algorithmic systems. The work thus functions as a meditation on how our understanding of comics is transformed when the “reader” is an artificial intelligence rather than a human interpreter. As comics increasingly exist as digital datasets rather than merely printed artifacts, Lu anticipates a future where comics historiography might be fundamentally reshaped by machine-learning approaches that identify formal patterns, visual genealogies, and evolutionary developments invisible to traditional analytical methods.
Research:Echo Chamber Editorialization: Paul Comoretto, Luca Reverdit, KangWei Peng Book design: Andy Grandillon Published by: La Cinquieme Couche (Belgium) 240 x 340 mm 104 pages CMYK Paperback 978-2-39008-102-9 €27
