Original artwork for Nancy comic strip, October 23, 1971

N.p. N.p., 1971. Original four-panel artwork by Ernie Bushmiller for the October 11, 1977 daily strip of his seminal comic strip Nancy. With white-out to the second panel, and faint annotations in manuscript pencil to the margins.

In this particular four-panel strip Bushmiller re-used a photostat of Nancy from the second panel for the third, not an uncommon practice among comic strip artists.

Of note, the pencil annotations in the upper right margin twice notes "The first female president," which Bushmiller curiously decided not to use as the punch line in the final panel, instead using "Miss America."

As with American cinema, it was the French who first championed the studied simplicity of Bushmiller's un-deconstructible combination of rigid artistic style and even more rigidly governed humor. In 2012, Fantagraphics Press took on the long overdue task of putting the complete series into book form.

In our estimation, Daniel Clowes put it best in his introduction to Fantagraphics' first volume of Bushmiller's long run. Clowes astutely points out that the Nancy seems to come "from some primal Jungian dreamscape, miraculously transmitted into the morning paper." He goes on to say how he imagines Bushmiller at work, "carefully extracting every shred of irony from each frame."

20.5 x 7 inches. Near Fine.

[Book #169534]