I’m told another social media holiday is upon us: National Cartoonists Day. And who am I to deny the algorithm when my fellow ink-slingers receive their own parade? (I would have suggested “Cartoonists Awareness Day,” to acknowledge cartooning as the incurable malady it really is, but who listens to me?)
I think it only appropriate on such an august occasion to honor that cartooning legend who is the true god of all right-thinking comics fans, Nancy creator Ernie Bushmiller.
What made Bushmiller the black-belt master of the cartoon arts? Let’s hear from our premiere comics theorist, Scott McCloud:
Ernie Bushmiller's comic strip Nancy is a landmark achievement: A comic so simply drawn it can be reduced to the size of a postage stamp and still be legible; an approach so formulaic as to become the very definition of the "gag-strip"; a sense of humor so obscure, so mute, so without malice as to allow faithful readers to march through whole decades of art and story without ever once cracking a smile. Nancy is Plato's playground. Ernie Bushmiller didn't draw A tree, A house, A car. Oh, no. Ernie Bushmiller drew the tree, the house, the car.
Much has been made of the "three rocks." Art Spiegelman explains how a drawing of three rocks in a background scene was Ernie's way of showing us there were some rocks in the background. It was always three. Why? Because two rocks wouldn't be "some rocks." Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. And four rocks was unacceptable because four rocks would indicate "some rocks" but it would be one rock more than was necessary to convey the idea of "some rocks." A Nancy panel is an irreduceable concept, an atom, and the comic strip is a molecule.
Three rocks for Ernie on this holiest of holidays!
- A.H.
(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)
The real testament to Bushmiller's work for me was back when we bought the two Fantagraphics collections for my six year old daughter. She not only read and re-read them until they were dogeared, her friends would come by, grab one of the collections, find a chair and sink into Bushmiller's world-sometimes for hours. It didn't matter if the jokes were about things that didn't exist in their world: WW2 shortages, guys advertising things on signboards, record players...They loved it all.
I was never that impressed. He defined a genre that was not much to begin with. I lost interest in both Bushmiller and the Sunday funnies at about the same. I got bored with the toothless content and generic drawing.
MAD was way jazzier for us restless brats who were getting tired of Ozzie and Harriet America.
JDA