A Report From Nancy Fest
We (my son and I) arrived at Nancy Fest at around 7:30 on Friday, May 24 so we missed most of the welcome talk. We drove the 650 miles from Des Moines to Columbus through torrential storms in Illinois and I forgot that we were driving from the central time zone to the eastern time zone. We should have left earlier. Anyway, we arrived hungry and were happy to find vegan hot dogs at the reception. We checked out the exhibit and talked to some people. The first person I talked to happened to be the guy who goes by “Erniebushmillerjrjr” on Instagram. We chatted with Bill Griffith, not realizing that he had been talking with Chris Ware!. There were more Nancy and Sluggo t-shirts here than I’ve ever seen anywhere else.
On Saturday morning, we showed up at 9 for donuts and coffee. The first panel of the day “The Nancy Summit, oyr, The First Official Meeting of the Ernie Bushmiller Society” convened at 10. Brian Walker, Dennis Kitchen, Gary Hallgren, Kaz, and Bill Griffith (Patrick McDonnell had to cancel) discussed how and why they first came to appreciate Nancy and Bushmiller. I was not taking notes so I don’t remember exactly what everyone said (I know, great report) but one moment stood out for me. During the Q&A session, a member of the audience asked the panel what they thought of Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy. I was expecting to hear some disdain at this point, but that didn’t happen. A few panelists said they didn’t really follow Jaimes’s strip that much, but they were glad that the strip was popular. Brian Walker, who curated the exhibit, then said that he read a book called The New Nancy by some professor whose name he couldn’t remember. That professor was me. Walker said the book led him to appreciate what Olivia Jaimes was doing in the space between newspaper comics and webcomics. I was thrilled that he had read my book.
At 11:30, the next presentation, and the one I was most excited for, started. The panel was called simply “The New Nancy.” Olivia Jaimes had planned to attend Nancy Fest in person, but could not. She recorded a slide presentation and asked that it not be recorded by the audience and that it be deleted right after her talk. Even as the voice reading the presentation spoke in the first person as Jaimes, I believe it was actually Jaimes’s editor, Sheena Wolf, who was reading. Regardless, Jaimes presentation “How to Write Nancy” showed that she has studied Nancy in depth.
Jaimes’ presentation used the humor that she brings to Nancy. She began by noting that what was to follow was “simply my take” and then saying “I am totally right about everything.” Jaimes argued that “a very specific type of gag defines Nancy.” Using a Bushmiller strip where Nancy looks at a crooked picture hanging on the wall and, instead of straightening the picture, she makes the chair she is sitting in crooked, Jaimes said that one could remove Nancy, Bushmiller’s draftmanship, and even change the words of the strip and it would still be recognizable as a Nancy gag. For Jaimes, a Nancy gag is a kind of analogy that makes “a nice shape” so that “Crooked frame is to straight viewer as straight frame is to crooked viewer.” Jaimes went on to give multiple examples of these shapes in Nancy comics. She began to wrap up by saying “I love her. I love Nancy so much.” Jaimes concluded by saying that she is “talking a brief and mysterious break” and that guest strips of Nancy would start appearing at the end of June.
After a lunch break, Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik spoke on their foundational book How to Read Nancy. I’m sure most people reading this are familiar with their book so I won’t recap their discussion. I will note that their talk made clear just how much work they put into gathering the materials for their book, finding original copies of strips, and painstakingly working on the book’s appearance. They also noted that they thought they were finished writing about Nancy but wrote a short essay for the exhibit catalog about Nancy’s face.
The next speaker was Bill Griffith, talking about and reading from his graphic biography of Bushmiller, Three Rocks. His talk was fascinating. Griffith said that he hears his creation Zippy the Pinhead’s voice as somewhere between Raymond Burr and Julia Child. I had never thought about what Zippy sounded like, so this information has changed the way I read Zippy. Among other insights, Griffith argued that Fritzi’s and Nancy’s relationship was antagonistic and that Bushmiller had wished he could drop Fritzi from the strip, as he had inherited her character from Larry Whitington. Griffith talked about rejecting the idea of there being a firm line between art and comics, which I’m sure his audience wholeheartedly agreed with. He talked about some similarities between Edward Hopper’s work and Nancy. He talked about the strangeness of 8-year old Sluggo’s libido. (It’s worth noting that Jaimes’s reboot of Nancy did away with any idea of a romantic relationship between Nancy and Sluggo, as well as leaving behind Sluggo’s attraction to every pretty girl he sees.) Griffith briefly talked about Olivia Jaimes. He said that Jaimes has not captured the surrealism of Bushmiller’s work. He also said that Jaimes seems not to be concerned with craft. I think he’s completely right about both of these things. I think that Jaimes has used concerns about craft as content of her strip. Her “bad” art often serves as the gag in Nancy. See, for instance, her December 22, 2018 and March 5, 2019 strips.
But getting back to Griffith’s presentation, he read the epilogue to Three Rocks, in which his comic alter ego “Griffy” meets up with an aged Nancy at the “United Features Retirement Facility No. 34” which is situated behind the “Bushmiller Museum of Comic Art” in Stamford, Connecticut. The epilogue is my favorite part of Three Rocks. Readers see that Nancy characters Plato, Spike, and Dagmar all live in the retirement village. Sluggo, however, does not. Nancy thinks to herself “I dream about him all the time.” Sluggo meets up with Griffy and decides to go talk to Nancy. Sluggo has a long white beard and moustache. They play bingo and reconcile. I don’t think many people would say that Nancy is emotionally poignant, but Griffith’s epilogue certainly is. It was a joy to hear him read it and comment on it.
At the book signing, I got Bill Griffith, Paul Karasik, Mark Newgarden, Denis Kitchen, Pete Maresca and Brian Walker all to sign my copy of the Sunday Press catalogue for The Nancy Show: Bushmiller and Beyond. Brian Walker was sitting next to Bill Griffith. I thanked Brian for reading my book, and I’m somewhat embarrassed to say, I gave a copy of The New Nancy to Griffith. He at least pretended to be interested in it. While waiting in line at the signing, I talked to Gary Hallgren, who was selling original art. I had not known that he was now the artist for the comic strip Hagar the Horrible. I then realized that this fact answered a question that I had been wondering about for over a year. On May 5, 2023, Helga is sitting at a table with a woman who looks like what an adult version of Nancy drawn in the Hagar comic style would look like. Hallgren put her in the comic pretty much because he could.
We unfortunately missed Tom Gammil’s play A Morning with Ernie Bushmiller as my son wanted sushi for dinner. I stopped briefly by the afterparty but did not stay long as I was tired. We drove home on Sunday.
Nancy Fest was incredibly well done. Brian Walker’s curation of the exhibit is stellar. Caitlin McGurk and the staff at Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum did a brilliant job. It was well worth driving over a thousand miles round trip in three days. Nancy Fest is over but the exhibit is at the museum until November. If you haven’t seen it, you should go. And you should buy a copy of The Nancy Show: Bushmiller and Beyond and, if you don't already own them, How to Read Nancy and Three Rocks.
