But what’s been missing among all this cheerleading, theorising, and enshrinement, however, is the opportunity to consider the strip free from framework and rubric, to watch it unravel at its own obtuse pace. These readings of Nancy all strike me as valid. We are accustomed, then, to read Nancy strips and panels in isolation, or as singular condensations of a particular theme, and always within a halo of rarefied cartoon essence. So Brian Walker’s Best of quite effectively samples from the feature’s entire career, while Kitchen Sink’s books re-organize the strips willy-nilly into thematic obsessions, almost tenacious in their consistency: Nancy eats food, dreams dreams, meets animals, scorns hippies. The collections we’ve seen so far, too, often emphasize an abstract Nancy, a universal Nancy, a pure and perfect Nancy, unfettered by context. Thanks to Scott McCloud’s “Five Card Nancy,” we know about the stand-alone integrity of every single panel thanks to Karasik and Newgarden’s “How to Read Nancy,” we know about the holy algebra of Bushmiller’s gagwork thanks to Art Spiegelman, we know about its definitive cartoon purity. Later generations of cartoonists would pick up on the unique and peculiar aura these artists tend to foreground in Nancy. Andy Warhol, Ray Johnson, Joe Brainard-their visual “takes” on Nancy demonstrate the weird mutability of Bushmiller’s comic, as well as its disarming resonance, like a five-and-dime version of some medieval icon. Instead, the blunt but beautiful world of Nancy first found currency among fine artists, mindful of the purely optic pleasures of the strip. Few wordsmiths penned paeans to cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller: after all, Nancy doesn’t trade in literary concerns like modernist wordplay or ambiguous phantasy. During its heyday, the strip may not have enjoyed the same cachet among tastemakers and the intelligentsia as Barnaby did with Dorothy Parker, say, or Krazy Kat with e.e.
The case has already been made for Nancy.
Nancy is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943-1945
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