June 15, 2023
An illustrated biography of Ernie Bushmiller (1905-1982), creator of the cult-favorite comic "Nancy." This book is a triumph because it not only recounts Bushmiller's legacy, but communes with his inimitable spirit. Employing meticulous pen-inked crosshatch drawings, Griffith, the creator of "Zippy," achieves wondrous results with an experimental approach to his source material. He demonstrates Bushmiller's creative process and inner thoughts, interpolating original "Nancy" illustrations into his own narrative. Characters appear in daydreams, and strips take shape as Bushmiller ruminates on a gag. This collaged technique creates an ineffable sense of posthumous collaboration between Griffith and his subject. Griffith traces Bushmiller's storied career at the New York World. At age 19, he was asked to take over the comic "Fritzi Ritz" after its creator quit. Nancy, the spiky-haired goofball whose innocent follies captured the nation's heart, first appeared in "Fritzi," and she became the star of her own strip in 1938. "Nancy" was eventually syndicated in nearly 900 papers, and Bushmiller drew daily comics until his death. He had idiosyncratic work habits: He would always begin with a goofy final panel (what he called the "snapper") and work backward to find a path to his punchline, and he had four drawing tables set up in his studio so he could work on pages in tandem. Reading "Nancy" can be similarly dizzying. In a series of asides, Griffith attempts to introduce highbrow elements to the strip's lowbrow humor and sparse composition. Perhaps Bushmiller's strips are "calling our attention to the form comics take--panels, balloons, composition." Yes, it's all funny, but "the joke is on us if we fail to see what Bushmiller is up to, namely, taking apart the comic strip & putting it back together again!" Griffith quietly invites readers to explore his own biography in the same critical way. This book is not simply a charming history of a plucky cartoonist, but a formal marvel, pushing at the boundaries of its medium. Firmly raises the bar for comics biographies.
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Starred review from July 10, 2023
One master of comics arts pays tribute to another in this inventive graphic biography of Ernie Bushmiller (1905–1982), creator of the long-running strip Nancy. Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead) and his Zen surrealist nonchalance might seem an odd fit for the ostensibly square Bushmiller. He certainly plays with form, inserting himself into the narrative and rearranging Bushmiller’s artwork—but he’s earnest about Nancy: “the perfect expression of what comics are.” The Bronx-born Bushmiller, as a funnies-obsessed 19-year-old high school dropout copy boy at the New York World, got a lucky break in 1925 when he was offered the gig to take over a cheesecake strip about a flapper named Fritzi. After he gave Fritzi a trouble-prone niece named Nancy in 1933, he found “the little dickens was soon stealing the show.” As Bushmiller advances from success to success with the retitled strip, Griffith resists seeking darkness beneath the contented exterior of an artist who married happily, read voraciously, and lived the suburban life in Connecticut. Contemporaries including actor Harold Lloyd, Krazy Kat’s George Herriman, and Flash Gordon’s Alex Raymond make cameos. Griffith points to the strip’s meta narratives and concise absurdist non-punch-lines (Nancy blows a gum bubble so large a confused Martian sees it) as proof that this little dickens meant more than the space she filled in back pages. It’s a surprisingly satisfying homage to an undersung artist.