Overview

"If you were alive in twentieth-century America, you knew Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy-and this new collection assembles some of the greatest strips featuring the much-loved cartoon icon and her pug-nosed companion, Sluggo. If you were alive in twentieth-century America, you knew Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy-and this new collection assembles some of the greatest strips featuring the much-loved cartoon icon and her pug-nosed companion, Sluggo. The newspaper cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller once admitted that ""all my characters are conceived in desperation."" Nancy was no exception. She was the niece of the star of his other strip, Fritzi Ritzi, and meant to serve as a throwaway gag character. But Nancy could not be contained- Within a few years, Bushmiller's strip had been renamed for her, and she had begun her ascent into the pantheon of cartooning greats. Nancy, along with on-and-off boyfriend Sluggo, delivered absurd laughs to readers for decades, all rendered in Bushmiller's distinctive line that cartoonist Denis Kitchen once called ""geometric perfection."" A masterpiece of humor and cartooning, Nancy earned both scorn and acclaim for decades, serving as a muse (and sometimes punching bag) for the likes of Andy Warhol, Joe Brainard, Gary Panter, Matt Groening, and more. This collection of Bushmiller's Nancy brings together a selection from the beloved Kitchen Sink Press editions of Nancy strips, including How Sluggo Survives! and Nancy Eats Food, as well as a number of newly selected cartoons. Together, this wide-ranging collection offers a chance for readers to experience the full range of Bushmiller's absurd humor and unexpected visual delights. As Nancy once said- ""Anything can happen in a comic strip!"""

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9781681378367

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Reviews

“Universalizing historians have given the newspaper comic strip a distinguished pedigree as the twentieth-century descendant of sacred Egyptian hieroglyphics. True or not, no classic strip was better suited to embellish the inner sanctum of Pharaoh Tut’s tomb than Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running tot saga Nancy...If Bushmiller was the comic-strip artist’s comic-strip artist, Nancy was a trademark to rival Coca-Cola’s logo.” —J. Hoberman, Artforum

“Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running comic strip, Nancy, helped establish the way we think visually.” —The Atlantic “Bushmiller refined his art, honed it to its barest essentials, and thereby produced a comic strip that in many respects was the very apotheosis of a comic strip.” —The Comics Journal “Bushmiller choreographed his familiar formal elements inside the tightest frame of any major strip, and that helped make it the most beautiful, as a whole, of any in the papers.” —The Village Voice “[A] sturdy American product and often a good chuckle.” —The New York Times “Nancy invites us to meditate on Bushmiller’s iconic landscape. She is pure Zen.” —Bill Griffith, author of Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy “Universalizing historians have given the newspaper comic strip a distinguished pedigree as the twentieth-century descendant of sacred Egyptian hieroglyphics. True or not, no classic strip was better suited to embellish the inner sanctum of Pharaoh Tut’s tomb than Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running tot saga Nancy.... If Bushmiller was the comic-strip artist’s comic-strip artist, Nancy was a trademark to rival Coca-Cola’s logo.” —J. Hoberman, Artforum “It is possible that Nancy is the best comic today, principally because it combines a very strong, independent imagination with simplification of the best tradition of comic drawing.” —The New Republic

Author Information

Ernie Bushmiller (1905-1982) was an American cartoonist best known for creating the daily comic strip Nancy, which has remained in print since 1938. After completing the eighth grade, Bushmiller dropped out of school and began working as a copy boy at the New York World. There, he ran errands, observed his cartoonist colleagues, and eventually picked up illustration assignments such as lettering speech balloons and designing crossword puzzles. In 1925, he was given the chance to take over Larry Whittington's comic strip Fritzi Ritz, which evolved into the long-running strip Nancy. Denis Kitchen is a cartoonist, writer, and publisher. In 1969, after the success of his self-published Mom's Homemade Comics, Kitchen launched Kitchen Sink Press to publish his own work and the work of other underground cartoonists. In its thirty-year run, Kitchen Sink published work by both new and older cartoonists including R. Crumb, Alice Kominsky-Crumb, Will Eisner, Milton Caniff, Charles Burns, Alan Moore, M. K. Brown, and Ernie Bushmiller. A monograph of Kitchen's own work, The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen, was published in 2010 by Dark Horse Comics and was nominated for both Harvey and Eisner Awards. Originally from Wisconsin, he now lives in Western Massachusetts.

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