As my username would indicate, I’m a fan of the old time comic strips.
I’ll admit from the start that I’ve never gotten the appeal of Krazy Kat - okay, I understand that many people think George Herriman was a genius, but I’m sorry I just don’t get it. Let’s move on.
The other mystery to me is Nancy - I heard enough people say that Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy is brilliant to know that there must be something to it. But I don’t see it. It may be because I haven’t read very many old Bushmiller strips. But I used to read it back in the seventies and I never felt like Nancy was anything special. Did Bushmiller maybe peak back in the forties and fifties and coast in his later years? Can somebody explain to me what I was missing?
I don’t know many people who will seriously argue that Nancy was brilliant. Maybe ironically (it was especially dire as it aged and was as much of a punchline for a bad comic strip that The Family Circle is today).
The early Nancy strips were decent, but no more than average than the strips of its day. As time went on, it became notorious as a collection of trite bad jokes surfing on it’s older popularity.
A few artists (including some good ones) have cited Nancy’s straightforward style as an inspiration, but I don’t think anyone really thinks it was much more than minor strip, always outclassed by any of a dozen strips at any time in its history.
The strip was originally about Aunt Fritzi and was called Fritzi Ritz. Nancy, originally a supporting character, gradually became the focus of the strip. Juvenile hijinks were getting bigger laffs than the travails of a flapper, one supposes. As for what you are missing, I couldn’t say. I’ve read the old strips in reprint and they are pretty bland fare. FTR, I never “got” Krazy Kat either.
I can’t help you there. I remember Nancy in the '60s and '70s, and it was universally reviled as the dumbest comic strip ever, even dumber than Family Circus (which at least had some thought put into it, even if it was trite). Nancy was just braindead.
The 1st edition of the American Heritage Dictionary chose a Nancy strip as the margin illustration for the entry “comic strip.” It showed Nancy finding “Talking Dolls” in a store for only $1, she gets happy and buys one. The box says “Made in Japan.” When she takes the doll out, its words in the word-balloon are written in an obviously phony attempt at counterfeiting Japanese kanji characters (and everyone knows that Japanese is written in a blend of three scripts: kanji, hiragana, and katakana.
I’m appalled at the casually racist cultural ignorance that once used to be accepted as normal. Ernie Bushmiller was too lazy to drag his fat butt to the library or bookstore and find some examples of real Japanese writing?
There was certainly plenty of casual racism in “th’ old days,” and comics (strips and books) were full of it. But if the strip in question was written in the '50’s or even '60’s, I think it’d take an awful lot more effort than you imagine to get it right. Now whether that’s an excuse or not is up to you.
Anyway, I think I too have heard people express admiration for Bushmiller’s lines less than his words.
The strip does seem to have attracted some highbrow attention at times. Back in 1989, Kitchen Sink Press came out with a series of thematic Nancy collections with titles like Nancy Eats Food. I once read an ad for it which praised the strip’s “minimalism.” No telling if it was ironic or not.
[the simpsons]
GENXER 1: That Homer Simpson is so cool!
GENXER 2: Are you being sarcastic, man?
GENXER 1: [pause] I don’t even know any more.
[/ts]
Apart from that, what can you say? Some folks just liked it. How else did it remain in syndication so long? From Don Markstein’s Toonopedia – http://www.toonopedia.com/nancy.htm:
There was no need to “get it right.” All Bushmiller was doing was make the reader understand that the doll was speaking Japanese. The fact that it wasn’t an actual Japanese phrase or writing has nothing to do with racism or sloppiness: none of his audience would be idiot enough to complain that it wasn’t “accurate” and, frankly, it pretty sad that anyone thinks this is a flaw in that strip.
So? I remember a Garfield strip where Garfield is playing with the telephone and Jon is chuckling over how cute it is. In the next panel you see a word-balloon full of Chinese-looking characters come out of the receiver while Garfield wears a self-satisfied smirk (like, “Just wait for your next phone bill, Jon!”) If those are real characters from Chinese or any other language I would be very surprised. How would that be an example of anti-Sinicism? It’s an established cartoon convention that you can represent foreigners’ speech/writing with any kind of random gibberish.
I don’t think it’s a big deal, but I’m not convinced. It seems to me analagous to someone aping chinese by saying (god forgive me) “ching chong chong chin chong.” If the joke were about a doll made in France (yes, I recognize that the socioeconomic history of the 20th century wouldn’t gestate such a gag, but bear with me), would you expect Bushmiller to have just put in a bunch of random letters with accent marks? I doubt it.
The champion of the “Bushmiller was a genius” view is Denis Kitchen, cartoonist and former publisher of Kitchen Sink Comics. In a Comics Journal interview, he explained that Nancy was the comic strip in its purest, least=pretentious form. When you see a tree or a boulder in the background, it’s a perfectly generic tree or boulder. The peephole in a wooden fence is the perfectly generic hole in a wooden fence. It’s the dumbest of artforms dumbed down to the purest level. And that takes a degree of genius.
I’m a fan of Bushmiller’s “Nancy” but I didn’t like the revised versions by the other artists after Bushmiller. I don’t think I can explain the appeal. The cartoon was inherently simple, from the the drawing style to the stories. Much of the appeal of “Nancy” was in the sight gags. And with “Nancy” you don’t have to be part of a certain demographic to enjoy it or get it. There’s a sort of simple timelessness to it, counter to many comics which remain stuck in the time period they represent complete with specific concerns to that time period.
There are quite a few old “Nancy” strips at I Love Comix. A modern strip that I like that owes much of its visual style, and often, the sight gag style to “Nancy” is “Underworld” by Kaz. The nice thing about “Underworld” however it that, unlike “Nancy”, it’s very jaded and adult-oriented, while still owing much to Bushmiller.
I remember the day that Laugh Parade was funny. I wish I’d saved it, because nobody believes me. It went something like this:
Guy walks up to an alien. There’s a flying saucer in the background, and the alien has an accoustic guitar. The caption read, “I have a message for the people of earth, and it goes a little something like this…”
