Original artwork for Nancy comic strip, October 14, 1969

N.p. N.p., 1969. Original four-panel artwork by Ernie Bushmiller for the August 9, 1979 daily strip of his seminal comic strip Nancy. With annotations in faint manuscript pencil to the margins,

In this particular four-panel strip Bushmiller used a photostat of the football player from the fourth panel for the third panel, not an uncommon practice among comic strip artists at the time.

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 7 inches. Near Fine.

[Book #169537]