Time & Perspective Quote by Bill Griffith

Revisionist feminism often starts as a shrug: of course she was doing that, we just didnt have the vocabulary. Bill Griffiths line about Little Lulu captures how cultural politics can hide in plain sight, smuggled in under the cover of a kids gag strip. He admits the split-screen experience of consuming pop culture before you have a framework for it: as a child or young reader, Lulu reads as personality first, ideology never. Feisty. Smart. Unbossed. Only later does the adult eye recognize the pattern: a girl character who refuses to be ornamental, who competes, argues, resists, outwits, and in doing so quietly disrupts the gender script of her era.

The sentence works because Griffith avoids triumphalism. He doesnt claim Lulu was written as a manifesto; he calls her an early feminist in retrospect, which is both generous and cautious. That qualifier "at the time" is the tell. It points to how feminism often operates culturally not as a slogan but as a set of behaviors that make authority look slightly ridiculous. Comics, especially, thrive on that: the punchline is frequently a child exposing adult logic as arbitrary. Put that child in a dress and you get subversion with plausible deniability.

Context matters, too. Little Lulu emerged in mid-century America, when domestic femininity was being sold hard and mass media rarely let girls be agents rather than lessons. Griffith, a cartoonist shaped by underground and alternative comics, is also tipping his hat to lineage: the strip tradition had room for rebellion long before the discourse caught up.