The Zen of Nancy

Children shudder at the smell of newness as a dog does when it scents a hare, expressing the madness which later, when we grow up, is called inspiration.
-- Isaac Babel

I can smell and taste the average American. They just like to lead nice, gentle lives and read about everyday normal events.
-- Ernie Bushmiller

Talk to anyone who grew up reading the funny pages in the '60s and '70s and chances are you'll find someone who, as I did, hated Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy. To those of us who grew up on Mad magazine and Laugh-In, the strip seemed impossibly old-fashioned, a throwback from an era when kids were supposed to enjoy the corny gags Bushmiller specialized in. They were the type of jokes that were always in the riddle books given you by some well-meaning but hopelessly out-of-touch relative who didn't realize you'd moved on from "Why did the chicken cross the road?" to "The Addams Family started when Uncle Fester farted."

I looked at Nancy -- with her spiky, black football helmet of hair and unchanging outfit of white blouse, black vest, and short, little girl's skirt -- and bald Sluggo, with his Dead End Kids duds and mannerisms, and saw no one like anyone I knew. And there were weirder things. Where were Nancy's parents? Why did she live with her Aunt Fritzi, who acted as if she were Ida Lupino mistakenly cast as June Cleaver? Who took care of Sluggo? And why didn't anybody do anything about him living in such a dilapidated dump?

To children, the old-fashioned is alien, and so, in some ways, it's at least as intriguing as it is irritating. Nancy drove me nuts ("Who could like this dumb strip?", I'd rail Sunday after Sunday), but I always read it, the way I'd sometimes chew on tinfoil. Looking back, I think that what fascinated me -- a sheltered suburban kid -- was Nancy and Sluggo's being able to do things that I couldn't, the way I was fascinated by my father's stories of working as a 12-year-old grocery delivery boy and being able to walk the city streets safely until after midnight. Nancy and Sluggo could walk to the movies, the ice-cream store, newsstands, museums, ballgames. I had to take a bus just to get to the center of my town to get a comic book, go to the library, or wander around Woolworth's. The nearest place to buy a candy bar was a market that required a 20-minute bike ride along a dangerously busy road. Nancy and Sluggo, I concluded, must be living in my parents' day, which only made it more confusing when Bushmiller included gags about movie ratings, air pollution, hippies.

I'm certain that Nancy, which today strikes me as one of the most sophisticated comic strips ever, wouldn't seem that way if it didn't have its roots in a time before the thought of kids traversing the city by themselves filled adults with all sorts of fears. Nancy's origins go back to 1925, when Ernie Bushmiller took over the comic strip Fritzi Ritz, which chronicled the exploits of a flapper. Fritzi's niece Nancy made her first appearance in 1933, shortly before Fritzi began a series of adventures that took her first to Hollywood and then to New York, where her riches-to-rags existence eventually settled into middle-class comfort. By 1938, Nancy, who had already pushed Fritzi to the sidelines, had taken over the strip in name (a Nancy-less Fritzi Ritz continued as a Sunday feature for years). That same year, Nancy's boyfriend, Sluggo, the street kid with a heart of gold, was introduced, and Bushmiller had hit on the formula that he'd stick with for nearly the next 50 years. Flip through any collection of Nancy strips (like the series published by Kitchen Sink Press), and you'll see strips from the '40s through the '70s, right next to each other, that are so refined, so consistent, it's often only the dumb topical gags Bushmiller occasionally succumbed to that give their date away.

It may seem strange to speak about the sophistication of a strip whose creator once said, "Long ago I decided that more people eat cornflakes than caviar. So I slant my gags to the Lawrence Welk gum chewers and it works." Sluggo's "dem, dese, and doses" may have been toned down, but neither he nor Nancy ever lost the wised-up, cheerfully cynical attitude that, in the era they sprang from, the Depression, characterized the reaction of those gum chewers to everyday life. For all the instances of "My goodness" and "Oh dear" that crept into her lingo later on, all her childish love of candy and hatred of school, Nancy seems much older, much cannier than the kids in today's comic strips and sit-coms with their patented sass, or even the junior philosophers of Peanuts. A recent cartoon in the New Yorker showed a distressed Nancy and Sluggo emerging from Kids, with Nancy exclaiming, "Yikes!" Funny on first glance, the gag backfired because Nancy would have spotted Larry Clark's mixture of hipness and editorializing for the P.T. Barnum con it is.

"There is nothing more obvious than Nancy, yet when we think about her," Roy Blount Jr. once wrote, "it is hard to get her in focus." By turns vain, generous, cranky, exuberant, selfish, lazy, ingenious, tenderhearted, deceitful, blunt, daydreaming, mischievous, resourceful, and astonishingly self-possessed, Nancy is moody enough, contradictory enough, to be wholly believable. No one would call her a rebel or a problem child, yet her loathing of duty, restraint, thrift, and moderation would be enough to cause W.C. Fields to make her an exception to his hatred of children. Dennis the Menace angling for a cookie or a root beer is merely an imp with a sweet tooth; Nancy dreaming of an ice-cream soda or blowing her last quarter on the movies is our collective id in plaid skirt and Buster Browns.

Nancy is the essence of her moods because the genius of Ernie Bushmiller's art was getting down to essences. "Dumb it down" was Bushmiller's advice to aspiring artists, and on the surface a lot of his gags are dumb. There's nothing laugh-out-loud funny about Nancy dismissing a newspaper account of a scientist claiming that Martians are living on Earth and then, in the final panel, finding a pair of lost eyeglasses with three lenses, or wandering through an art museum munching a banana and leaving the peel for a startled guard to find on the floor beneath a still life of a bowl of fruit. But the disciplined simplicity of the drawing, the strict removal of everything except what was essential to the gag (Bushmiller had once designed crossword puzzles and often drew Nancy with a T-square), the inexplicable yet logical interplay of black and white, lines and curves, mass and blank space, sets off a queer thrumming accord deep in your brain that recognizes something both familiar and utterly new -- as if you'd suddenly grasped the principle of why light bends at the horizon.

Bushmiller played with the form as Tex Avery and Chuck Jones did in their cartoons. There are strips of Nancy cutting the edge of the frame to let in some air, bending the top of it down to serve as a clothesline, lifting the corner of it to sweep dirt underneath. At times she and Sluggo are as helpless in the face of Bushmiller's whims (suspended in mid air while he takes a coffee break) as Daffy Duck is in Jones's "Duck Amuck." Bushmiller's dopy slams at abstract art aside, his farthest-out gags are often the ones where everyday objects become mechanisms in jokes executed with a surreal Zen-like beauty, like the line from an old Woody Allen routine about machines replacing people: "At the circus, the eight-foot man has been replaced by a ten-foot steel rod."

There's an unshakable logic to Bushmiller's work, a logic that Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy, recognized in his strip "It's Bushmiller Time," in which Zippy asks Ernie the question "What is fun Ernie?" Ernie's unchanging, mantra-like response: "Three rocks." Griffith shows Zippy staring intently at the rocks that invariably inhabited every park or forest in Nancy, those three simple half-circles of varying size, trying to divine the truth of Ernie's response like a puzzled pupil trying to work out a guru's cryptic pearl of wisdom. "Four rocks?", Zippy asks in a panel that shows a tad too much detail. "No," Ernie replies. "Two rocks?", Zippy persists, now standing in a frame that shows just a touch too little detail. "Sorry," Ernie answers sympathetically but insistently: "Three rocks." There's no explaining why those rocks are funny; they just are, in the same way that a good comedian, honing a line so it sounds just right, knows that 62 is funnier than 47.

That abstract simplicity is the subject of some of the essays and homages in Brian Walker's indispensable The Best of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy (Comicana Books, $10.95), like Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik's superb, articulate "How To Read Nancy," or Newgarden's haunting "Love's Tender Fury," where Nancy, the object of Bazooka Joe's passion after he spots her on a subway, is deconstructed into floating patterns of the lines and circles that make up her features, into newsprint, and finally into black squares lost in the middle of white panels, like the face of a loved one dissolving in memory.

Artists -- the museum variety, I mean -- who hit upon a style that comes to characterize them share something with the genre artists who create characters that remain durable over the long haul. They've both found the vehicle that's the simplest -- and if they're lucky, deepest -- way for them to express their concerns. Ernie Bushmiller is the only artist I can think of whose body of work could be grasped immediately by Arthur Conan Doyle, Chuck Jones, and Piet Mondrian. Nancy abides. Next to her, our changing styles and attitudes and culture can make us feel like the ones stranded in Neverland.