March 19, 2018

"Nancy doesn’t tell us much about what it’s like to be a kid. What Nancy tells us is what it’s like to be a comic strip."

Wrote Bill "Zippy the Pinhead" Griffith, quoted in "Grown Men Reading 'Nancy'" by Dash Shaw in the New York Review of Books. I followed the "Nancy" craze at the time, so it's fun for me to stumble into reading about it today:
Nancy became a touchstone for artists to appropriate, distort, and transform. In Raw, Mark Newgarden’s 1986 comic Love’s Savage Fury depicted a Nancy whose minimal facial features rearrange while Bazooka Joe, a Topps bubblegum package mascot, eyes her across a NYC subway. Newgarden (who worked at Topps and co-created The Garbage Pail Kids) and Paul Karasik (a Raw associate editor and cartoonist who would go on to co-write the graphic-novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass) then collaborated on a 1988 essay titled “How to Read Nancy” that deconstructed the elements of a single 1959 Nancy gag in nine ways across eight pages. By isolating elements of the comic, they explored how each piece supported the entire gag—for example, solely the dialogue of the strip; then solely the spotted blacks; then the arc of the horizon line, etc....

Three decades later, in an epic feat of comics fandom, research, and obsession, Newgarden and Karasik have expanded that essay into a 274-page book examining over forty elements of the same 1959 gag.
Whoa! Must buy.
This gag comic strip now joins the ranks of works of art that have entire books dedicated to them. What Newgarden and Karasik have done here is clearly, methodically, often hilariously explained the unique beauty and craft of comics..... [O]ne chapter of How to Read Nancy, titled “The Leaky Spigot,” focuses on the number of droplets placed around the spigot at the center of the strip. Four droplets communicate that there is a great deal of pressure pulsing through the hose. The greater the pressure, the more rewarding Nancy’s vengeance will be. Two or three droplets would not imply this strength of pressure. Five might suggest a malfunction, and would break the graphic symmetry of the design. Karasik and Newgarden also note that the droplets to the right are slightly smaller and therefore in spatial perspective. Every element of the strip is analyzed to this degree of fascinating and humorous detail.
It must have been hard for Dash Shaw to resist quoting the most famous thing anyone ever said about "Nancy": "It's harder to not read Nancy than to read it." I'm saying it because it's harder not to say it than to say it.

27 comments:

DKWalser said...

So, they’re mansplaining Nancy. But, in this case, it’s okay.

tcrosse said...

Aunt Fritzi was the inspiration for Sex and the City.

khematite said...

"It's harder to not read Nancy than to read it."

Was that the original quote? Wasn't it something more like "It takes less time to read Nancy than to decide whether or not to read it"?

wild chicken said...

I read Nancy but preferred Little Lotta myself. But that was never a Thing.

Bilwick said...

When I was a kid I liked it, especially the Nancy comic-books which were not as simple as the comic strip. Once I got into my teens I saw the strip as not just simple (which can be a virtue) but simple-minded and dull. Still, someone seemed to like it.

"Aunt Fritzi was the inspiration for Sex and the City." Really? I was thinking of a NATIONAL LAMPOON parody on the strip. In the strip, you almost never saw Fritzi completely but invariably a head looking around a corner. In the NatLamp parody, Nancy asks her, "Why are you always in another room, looking around a corner. "Never you mind!" Frizi says--and we see her, naked from the waist down and holding a vibrator. That image has stayed with me for a long, long time.

Churchy LaFemme: said...

At one time, "Nancy" was the illustration for "Comic Strip" in the American Heritage dictionary, with Nancy pulling the string of a talking doll "Made In Japan", and getting a stream of Japanese glyphs as the sound effect.

The strip apparently ended for now several weeks ago with current creator Guy Gilcrest marrying Nancy's Aunt Fritzi to her decades-absent (our time) beau from the 30s when she was the star of the strip:

http://www.gocomics.com/nancy/2018/02/18

incidentally, the strip goes out to the Beach Boys Wouldn't It Be Nice with an accurately rendered vintage 45 single of same.

However all that said, your best guide to analyzing the comic art form is Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.

Kensington said...

Three opinions:

1. Nancy at its more traditional was a terrible, terrible comic strip.

2. Zippy the Pinhead is even worse in an entirely different way.

3. Aunt Fritzi was hot.

Kensington said...

One follow-up opinion: experimental, non-traditional Nancy was pretty awful, too.

Darrell said...

Fritzi Ritz married Archie?

Kensington said...

One final opinion (sorry!): modern Nancy (2008-present) Nancy seems no worse than any other conventional comic strip. That's something. Maybe.

Churchy LaFemme: said...

Gilchrist took some of the elements of the Bushmiller era strip (like Sluggo being an orphan who apparently lived on the streets) and made them palatable for the modern era. When Phil came back to town and rekindled with Fritzi, Gilchrist made clear he was looking out for Sluggo though trying not to hurt his pride. Also, props for making him a preacher *and* a positive role model, something you don't see too often in current pop culture.

MayBee said...

I'm lost.

gadfly said...

Those of us who relied on the Sunday Comics for weekend entertainment as we were growing up, NEVER read Nancy. Now I discover why that is so. Ernie Bushmiller, who drew Nancy episodes for fifty years relied on the Sears Roebuck catalog to find his sight gags. For example Fritzy Ritz complained to boyfriend Phil Fumble about her "dishwasher hands", so Phil went into Sears to discuss the problem with the automatic dishwasher salesman. He returned with a pair of rubber gloves for Nancy's aunt. Kids cannot find stuff like that interesting - but if you are writing for adult readers ....

gadfly said...

Blogger tcrosse said...
Aunt Fritzi was the inspiration for Sex and the City.

So Cynthia Nixon is really Fritzi Ritz! Someone should warn Governor Cuomo.

Shawn Levasseur said...

This reminds me of a game I heard of, Five Card Nancy.

The basic idea is to make cards of individual panels from Nancy strips. Players are dealt five panels. Then they are used to assemble a new strip. It can lead to amusing or surreal strips.

It's better explained in detail at the site of the game's creator: Scott McCloud.

http://scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/nancy/index.html

Ralph L said...

At some point in the 80's or early 90's, the strip went from deathly dull and poorly drawn to pretty funny and the original style.

We get The Argyle Sweater, which is similar to The Far Side with visual puns.

Marc in Eugene said...

Ha, ha, MayBee-- I wasn't absolutely sure, until Aunt Fritzi's name came up in the comments, what was being written about, either.

robother said...

I remember Nancy and Sluggo, but my eyes usually went to other strips pretty quick. My wife grew up with the gal who did the Cathy comic strip, and she'd write when she was coming through town (I think with some boyfriend who was a harpoonist--the red bandanna type, not whaler), but my wife was afraid she'd end up in the damn cartoon.

Plumber said...

This book leaves McCloud in the dust.

Henry said...

Currently reading Michael Tissarand's impressive biography of George Herriman, Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White by. The Nancy book is being recommended to me. Not my style.

Bad Lieutenant said...

http://www.gocomics.com/nancy/2018/02/24

Do not let Chuck read this one. Especially the last panel. He simply would not understand.

dustbunny said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
dustbunny said...

Was it Nancy or Little Lulu where the characters sometimes entered into a different, darker dimension? It was weird and psychedelic before I knew what psychedelic was.

Wilbur said...

Three rocks. Not two. Not four.

Robert Cook said...

As a lifelong fan of comics and as an occasional cartoonist myself, I have never found the "genius" (or humor) in Nancy that so many other cartooning cognescenti find there. Perhaps Bushmiller was a master craftsman of the mechanics of comics, but that doesn't make if funny, just as the thousands of impeccably crafted life drawings and paintings that issued from the French Academy are not art.

Robert Cook said...

"'Aunt Fritzi was the inspiration for Sex and the City.' Really?"

No.

John W said...

The “Nancy” comic book was done by the brilliant John Stanley, who also did the “Little Lulu” comic book. You are probably thinking of the “Nancy” stories with Oona Goosepimple, a Wednesday-Addams sort of girl, who had an entrance to the dangerous land of the Yo-yos behind her fireplace. In the last few years, Oona and the Yo-yos have made some appearances in the strip.