As someone with very little exposure to, and no specific affinity for, Ernie Bushmiller’s NANCY comic strip, I have to say I really enjoyed this essay by Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik. In it the authors outline “How To Read Nancy”, which also happens to be why to read it, which was far more important to me.
Normally I’d skip right over this, an article on a website imploring the virtues of a strip that I couldn’t really give a shit about, but Frank Santoro laid down the law over on the Comics Comics blog: to discuss the structure of comics on that blog you gotta read this essay first, and I’d hate to be locked out of a smart conversation because I think a comic I haven’t really read is stupid.
It turns out? More to NANCY than one might think. It’s a strip designed to be read as quickly and easily as possible and is incredibly complex in doing so: on closer inspection it peels back like an onion and lays bare the fundimentals of comics creation. Neat trick. With Fantagraphics about to start publishing omnibus collections of the Ernie Bushmiller NANCY next spring, and a book-format expansion of this essay by Newgarden and Karasik on the way soon, it looks all of us folks interested in the form and structure of comics–not to mention stupid gags–are in for a treat.
Go read the essay, and maybe change your mind about NANCY.
– Christopher