Original artwork for Nancy comic strip, January 5, 1963

N.p. N.p., 1963. Original three-panel artwork by Ernie Bushmiller for the January 5, 1963 daily strip of his seminal comic strip Nancy. With pencil annotations to the margins.

In this particular three-panel strip Bushmiller used a photostat of the mailman from the second panel for the first panel, not an uncommon practice among comic strip artists.

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."

21 x 6.25 inches. Near Fine.

[Book #169535]