Who among us who know Nancy (yet how can you really know Nancy), doesn’t love her? Ernie Bushmiller’s, ageless little girl is so graphically pure – so simply drawn, she can be reduced to the scale necessary for this blog. Nancy is a masterpiece of concision. With a helmet of spiky fraktur hair, coal black period eyes, em-dash nose and parenthesis eyebrows is the 20th century’s “typographic woman.”
Born in 1933, the same year Hitler came to power (although there is no apparent connection), Nancy was the niece of Fritzi Ritz, a sexy airhead, whose comic popularity was on the wain. Nancy became the daily strip’s staple. She and Sluggo Smith, a pug-nosed urchin, routinely had to solve problems of circumstance.
Fantagraphics is releasing a new compendium of Nancys, Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943-1945. So enjoyably funny you’ll want to read them all in one sitting — and maybe even sitting with friends in a round-robin-group-read.
More Design Resources: