Joe Brainard, Nancy Collages (1963)

Nancy Collgaes by Joe Brainard.

In 1963 poet and artist Brainard began cutting up Ernie Bushmiller's classic Nancy into new assemblages, recombining and detourning the comics into profane, looking-glass versions of themselves. Brainard was one of the first to incorporate comics and appropriation into a large part of his artistic practice. (He also adapted his friends' poetry into comics form in his C Comics magazine, but those will have to wait until 1964.)

 

Hergé, The Castafiore Emerald (1963)

 

The Castafiore Emerald by Hergé.

In many ways the best Tintin album but also the least typical. In place of the usual globe-trotting adventure we get an exquisite farce with all the precision of a stage-play or classic film.

Shigeru Mizuki, Akuma-kun (1963)

Akuma-kun by Shigeru Mizuki.

Groundbreaking series by the yokai horror mangaka about a little boy who can summon demons. Very similar to Mizuki's long-running Kitaro series, Akuma-kun is full of the same inventive grotesques and monsters. 

Daniel Clowes, Lloyd Llewellyn (1986)

Lloyd Llewellyn #1 by Dan Clowes.
 

Lorenzo Mattotti, Fires (1986)

 

Fires by Lorenzo Mattotti. 

Art Spiegelman, Maus, Volume One: My Father Bleeds History (1986)

 

Maus, Volume One: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman.

Ernie Bushmiller, Nancy (1938)

 

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.