Nancy by Ernie Bushmiller (1938)
Ernie Bushmiller took over Larry Whittington's "Fritzi Ritz" comic strip in 1925 and introduced the character of Nancy, Fritz's niece, in 1933. By 1938 Nancy had taken over the strip and it was renamed simply "Nancy" as Bushmiller focused more on the surreal antics of the little girl and her working class boyfriend Sluggo.
Over the years, and until Bushmiller's death in 1982, Nancy became something like the ne plus ultra of the American newspaper comic strip; a stripped-down, elegant gag-a-day work of art that explored quotidian absurdities using the language of cartooning like few others. Deceptively simple, Nancy with form, time, and space with a supremely modernist outlook.
The critics:
"Ernie Bushmiller is my comics Kafka."
---Jerry Moriarty, 1988.
