Comic oddities: The mystery of Lola

For many years, particularly in the decades after World War 2, magazines devoted to cartoons were a familiar sight on bookstalls and in newsagents. I'll be looking at them in more depth at a later date but today I just want to focus on one publication. Cartoon: It's a Hoot! was an 84 page pocket-size magazine published by IPC Magazines in 1969. Like most publications of its ilk it contained lots of gag cartoons covering topics such as marriage, work, mothers-in-law, glamourous secretaries, bars, women .... you guessed it, they were very much aimed at the average man of the times. 

Amongst the gag cartoons in this publication were 11 four-panel silent comic strips starring an attractive woman named Lola and her dealings with various men. I get the impression that all the cartoons in the magazine are reprints from America and/or Europe, and I'm guessing Laugh with Lola is an import too. A Google search turns up nothing, but that's no surprise as I imagine 'Lola' isn't the name the character originally appeared under.

This strip has always mystified me. Where did it originally appear? Spain? Italy? (I'm inclined to think it's likely to be European rather than American.) Typically, IPC whited out all the signatures on the cartoons, but they missed one. Here's an enlargement. Does anyone recognise it? Looks like 'SIGO' perhaps? (Of course, it might be a serial number - 5160!) 

According to the numbering inside It's a Hoot that was 'Cartoon Book No.37' so clearly it had run for some time under various titles. There was also a companion volume called Cartoon: Masterpiece of Mirth which I had but I threw it out years ago unfortunately.

Anyway, an IPC publication that you may not have seen before, and a comic strip to ponder over. Who was Lola?