Oh, you thought I’d already written as much about Nancy Comics as any comics blogger in the past few months? Well, I found other Nancy’s book, this book sits on a bookshelf in my ancestral home, where it has been since the publisher Drawn & Quarterly sent it to me as a review copy back in 2009.
I thought it might be worth re-reading this book, a collection of character work from the comic book spinoffs by writer/artist John Stanley, I’ve just been reading a lot of Ernie Bushmiller’s originals lately Nancynot to mention those of Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden How to read Nancy and Bill Griffith’s Three rocks. and Attended a two-day event dedicated to honoring Bush Miller and his Nancy These authors have also given lectures.
Simply put, I am very, very, a lot of I’m much more familiar with the source material for the comics collected in this book than I was when I originally saw it in 2009, so I thought it might be worth re-reading it now (for regular EDILW readers who are tired of Nancy talking, let me reassure you , this is my last post on the subject for the foreseeable future, and the following posts will be devoted almost entirely to reviews of DC Comics Superbooks that you might better connect the blog to.
The cover design of this beautiful hardcover is provided by Canadian cartoonist Seth (clyde fans and It’s a good life if you’re not weak), who is also responsible for book design at Fantagraphics whole peanuts Publishing projects. Here, he highlights the iconographic perfection of Bushmiller’s Ultimate Nancy design, focusing on her trademarks such as the bow, the strange peaked helmet, and the punctuating elements on her face (in a new article) The Nancy Show: Celebrating the Art of Ernie BushmillerKarasik, and Newgarden demonstrate the ease with which Nancy’s blank, staring face can be reproduced with only a small amount of punctuation).
in three Nancy Following the first volume, Seth would create another cover offering a similar close-up view of Sluggo without a hat, with Nancy’s icon dancing in his eyes (Volume 3), followed by a pair featuring Nancy side by side Walking covers the John Stanley-created characters Oona Goosepimple (Volume 2) and Sluggo (Volume 4), the latter two characters having Seth’s own unique style. All four volumes are part of Drawn & Quarterly’s “The John Stanley Library,” which also includes his collection Tabby, melvin monster and Thirteen years old, thirty years old.
Although D&Q’s website solicitation copy for the first volume calls it “kid-friendly” and a companion volume to the Dark Horse series. Little Lulu (and Tabby), the John Stanley Library editions all seem more adult-focused, and are beautiful, shelf-ready hardcovers that require a sense of importance and care when handling and reading, unlike Dark Horse Stanley’s Digest-sized trade paperback format. The collection is different. Little Lulu comics.
As for the comics included in this volume, they are Nancy #146-#150, presumably Part of the Dell comic series, originally published in 1957 and 1958.
Like many children’s comics of the time, each issue was essentially an anthology, with comics of varying lengths filling the space between covers. Some of them are very short, only one page long, and the features are sort of like Nancy Sunday strip, I thought, while many other stories were written for page after page.
That’s a lot of room for Nancy’s stories, because Bushmiller, at the height of his comic-making prowess, worked in extremely short, simple, self-contained, multi-panel narratives, striving to make each story Being as efficient as possible, using no words if not necessary, using lines or dots, gives his best visual jokes an instant punch. (Wally Wood famously said, “It is harder not to read Nancy than to read it.”)
However, given the blocks and pages Stanley would have to fill, that’s certainly not possible (unless, one assumes, he turned the comic book series’ issues into a Bushmiller parody of the series Nancy He created his own comic strips, each page filled with three to six two-, three- or four-panel comics.
All that narrative space is enough to twist Buechler’s Nancy into something weird, even weird, much like similar comic book spin-offs did (and continue to do) to Charles Schulz’s comics ) peanut (Boom posted Dell Peanut Archives In 2018, collecting the publisher’s Peanuts comics from the 1950s and 1960s, Boom continues to publish comics based on the character in a comic book format).
Well, what fans and aficionados appreciate most about Bushmiller’s strips—the aforementioned simplicity, the neat but precise drawing techniques, the instant laughs—almost inevitably find their way into the content of the comic books is missing.
There are central characters and their relationships. Nancy and the other characters in the strip almost all look like themselves, as Stanley and Gormley import their designs perfectly, and there’s rarely an expression or pose that looks too un-Bushmiller.
So Nancy and Sluggo mostly look and act like themselves. And then there’s Aunt Fritz, who is drawn in the old glamor girl style, following the comics, which makes her look like she doesn’t belong in the same world as Nancy and the others at all. The bully Spike appears a lot, as does the rich kid Rollo, whose last name is “Harvard” (I’m not sure if this is from Bushmiller’s comic or a Stanley addition; this is my first time see). Phil Ferble even made a brief appearance on one panel. (Also, many of the background characters look more like Stanley’s designs than Bushmiller’s.)
While these characters and their basic dynamics are carried over from the comics, what’s interesting about Stanley’s Nancy reads like stanley’s Little LuluBoth play a smart, precocious young girl and her male best friend/rival/frenemy (Slugo plays Tubby) as they navigate a typical, even ordinary, mid-twentieth century America. The small town experiences humorous but mundane adventures (if anyone wants to see it, there are more similarities, including Nancy occasionally taking care of the kid Peewee, just like Lulu takes care of Alvin).
In fact, reading this article is very much like reading Little Luluonly with different actors playing the characters.
These stories, due to their length, obviously had to abandon the visual gag format perfected by Bushmiller, around which his best comics revolved, as the premises in the stories were explored and the various types of gags were repeated over and over again. , until the story runs out.
For example, Sluggo takes Nancy ice fishing and develops a series of verbal jokes centered around Nancy’s misunderstandings about various fish species. Or Nancy and Slugo try to make dinner for Aunt Fritz who is late, only to encounter a series of mishaps. Or maybe Nancy adopted a big dog and it caused all kinds of trouble.
Stanley also introduces some original characters who relate to some of the most dramatic departures from the real world. Nancy comics.
The first is the aforementioned Oona Goosepimple, an unnervingly creepy little girl who lives with her witch-like grandmother in a big, strange house with her uncle Eek, a A man shrunk by a rat. In two stories, Nancy visits Oona’s home, and Oona appears several times in the shorter story.
There is also a thief named Bill Bungle, who appears in two stories with Sluggo. In the first story, he sneaks into Slugo’s house to attempt a robbery, only to recruit Slugo to help him find Rollo’s house. In a later story, Sluggo visits Bill on the day he is released from prison, only to discover that a strange accident has caused Bill’s cell to be replaced by a gorilla.
Coming from the master of children’s comics, sure, these are pretty good comics, but boy, are they any different than they were in their prime. Nancy. If anyone has access to the old Nancy Bushmiller treated it like an old-fashioned serial and gave Fritz and the kids longer adventures (some of which were included in Brian Walker’s 1988 collection) Selections from “Nancy” by Ernie Bushmiller), which might better compare to what Stanley has done with comic book stories.
Finally, Drawn & Quarterly’s Nancy Vol. 1 The comic is good…but a bit strange Nancy.
If you’re interested in checking it out for yourself, it looks like the first three volumes of the book. Nancy The collection at Drawingandquarterly.com is still in stock, as is Tabbyfeaturing some of my favorite characters.
