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Chapter Five explores the rich and interesting but critically neglected Li'l Tomboy comic book series.Released by Charlton Comics from 1956 through 1960, the series did far more than simply challenge traditional female gender roles in the 1950s; it also challenged the newly established Comics Code.In numerous issues, the title character engages in behaviors that could easily be regarded as delinquent:she commits petty theft, intentionally destroys private property, and sasses adult authority figures, including police officers.Moreover, Li'l Tomboy engages in these activities not simply under the watchful eye of the Comics Code Authority, but, astoundingly, with their official seal of approval.During a time when the censors employed by the Authority office were at their most powerful and restrictive, Li'l Tomboy engaged in antics that far exceeded those that had been forbidden in other publications.Accordingly, this chapter tells the story of how, with the creation of Li'l Tomboy, Charlton Publications demonstrated that postwar gender conformity could be resisted and, even more significantly, so too could the Comics Code.

Chapter Three examines Marjorie Henderson's Buell's Little Lulu.When the now iconic figure moved from The Saturday Evening Post where she had resided since the 1930s to comic books during the 1950s, her character underwent numerous transformations.One compelling but formerly overlooked change is the nature of Lulu's rebellion.In the single-panel gag comics, the young girl was overwhelmingly targeting adults with her antics.Meanwhile, in the comic books, her sworn enemy is the gang of neighborhood boys. This modification from Little Lulu engaging in intergenerational conflicts during the pre-war era to intragenerational ones during the postwar period forms a compelling and previously unexplored facet to the literary, artistic, and cultural alterations that took place to this character across different print formats.The shift from plots that pitted children against adults in the 1930s to ones that pitted girls against boys in the 1950s reflects larger shifts in American culture regarding the gendering of children and the sexual segregation of childhood.

Chapter Four features the cartoon-character-turned-comic-book-star Little Audrey.Appearing in her first issue in 1948, the spunky little character would become one of the most beloved and most widely recognized personalities in comics over the next quarter of a century.While the Little Audrey comic books were a wholly separate commercial and creative endeavor from cartoon movie shorts, they retained one powerful link to the version on the big screen:the title character's penchant for dreaming.In numerous issues of the comic book, Little Audrey falls asleep and embarks on an imaginative adventure that constitutes the bulk of the storyline.This chapter places the Little Audrey comic books in general and the dream sequences that occur within them in particular back within their original postwar setting that was fascinated with Freudian psychology.As this discussion contends, these features do far more than simply expand the postwar reach of pop psychology.In an arguably even more important implication, they also challenge the era's prevailing views about child psychology.Accordingly, this chapter explores what Freudian theory can reveal about the dream sequences in Little Audrey and, in turn, what the series' traffic in postwar psychoanalysis can tell us about the role that comics storytelling for young people played in efforts to question, resist, and challenge this climate.