A Report From Nancy Fest

  

 

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. 

 

 

 

This Week in Nancy: "Mass Hysteria"

In How to Read Nancy, Karasik and Newgarden, in their discussion of "ballon design," note "Any number of word balloons can be used within a panel . . . For Bushmiller one balloon per panel was the norm, two were the exception, and three or more were reserved for mass hysteria" (140). On April 28, then Olivia Jaimes gives us mass hysteria. Five word balloons crowd the space of the third panel, crushing Nancy, who pulls her arms toward her body and grimaces. All of the words in the balloon exceed the space of the panel; almost half of the words cannot be read because the push into the invisible space inside or underneath the panel.

The words themselves continue Jaimes' meta-commentary from last week about Ernie Bushmiller purists. The first panel features Nancy, seemingly floating in white space, while someone off-panel intones, "Nancy is iconic for her simplicity." In panel two, another voice adds a longer commentary--notice that the line of the word balloon is lower in the second panel than the one in the first, suggesting a second speaker. Another speaker than chimes in from the right. We cannot see all the words that this speaker intones. The words will not fit in the panel. And the word balloons are beginning to crowd Nancy. She raises her hand as if defense, as if she is getting ready to push back. Her half-smile from the first panel becomes a frown. Her eyebrows straighten out and push toward each other. By the third panel, her mouth opens slightly in a frown. She looks like she cannot breathe. Word bubbles from the left and from the right touch each of her hands as she tries to push back. The word bubble in the bottom right side of the panel cover part of her shoe. Nancy is in danger of being blocked out, erased. That's the gag. The online commentary is not allowing us to see Nancy today.

On Monday, April 30, Jaimes continues her meta-commentary. Speaking to Sluggo, Nancy says "I'm sick of these reboots and restarts." Fans of Bushmiller everywhere nod in agreement (perhaps while they acknowledge but dismiss the irony as simplistic). Panel two zooms in on Nancy's angry face, ash she complains "why can't something that's gone stay gone?" The half of Sluggo's face that we can see looks neutral--his mouth a straight line, his nose a quarter circle and a dot, his pupil a black dot, and his eyebrow a semi-circle above his eye. Panel three pulls back from Nancy's face. We see four bushes and two gigantic flowers. Tiny black dots of pollen emanate from two of the bushes and the flowers. There are no rocks. The gag, as revealed by Sluggo's dialogue: Nancy was talking about the return of spring, and the pollen that causes her allergies. See--she wasn't talking about her own reboot. We have one more day of direct meta-commentary ahead of us. 

On May 1, Nancy sits on an undersized chair and looks through her window at the black diagonal slashes of rain falling. She says "I love the sound of rain." Readers, of course, cannot hear the rain, we can only see the black lines that signify rain is falling. In panel two, which zooms out a bit, Jaimes helps us to hear the rain. The word "PLOP" appears seven times, in bold type, around the window. But Nancy sees the words! The gag is in panel two. Her word balloon partially covers two of the "PLOPS" as she says "also the sight of the sound of rain." Karasik and Newgarden write, "In short: the lettering in comics is generally meant to be read and not seen." Undermining that general knowledge establishes the gag--we first read the words and hear them as the sound of rain but then Nancy sees them and we cannot help but see them. She concludes, in the third panel, her face occupying the middle third of the panel "Ahhhh . . . so relaxing." Her eyes are shut. Nancy does not see the "PLOP"s that fill the space around her because her eyes are shut. Note, too, that Jaimes uses what K and N call "The Modified Silhouette," the small white (or in this case, green) space that surrounds something. "A white halo around an object grants prominence" (143). Unlike the word balloons from a few days ago, the "PLOPS"s do not touch Nancy. Instead, they follow the contours of her body, head, hair, and bow. Not only do they lend prominence to Nancy, they keep their distance, as they are in on the joke. 

May 2 gives a straight-up visual gag. Nancy's jam handprint serves as not the kind of reminder that she intended. Sluggo is mad about the jam on his shirt but he is also aware of Nancy's obliviousness,  as one of his eyebrows arches and the other curls. No meta-, no social media, just a gag.

 May 3 returns us to the outdoors and to spring. Nancy seems to have gotten over her annoyance of a few days ago regarding spring. In the first panel, she is framed by blue sky as she smiles and says "Spring is so beautiful." The second panel makes a jarring shift in perspective. Nancy speaks from off-panel left, as we see bushes, flowers, and a tree take central focus, like the scene Nancy and Sluggo walked through on April 30. The bushes seem to have finished blooming. Instead of flowers, all they have are small black dots. Nancy sets us up for a visual gag. Spring is only beautiful "for the ten seconds I can see it before my eyes start tearing up from allergies." The ten seconds elapse in the gutter before panel three. The lines of the scene become wavy and imprecise. Nancy's teary vision infects the reader's eyes. But there's also a secondary joke. The word bubble in panel three differs from the one in panel two a bit. Whereas panel two's bubble's tail starts very close to the edge of the panel, telling us that the speaker is outside the panel, the bubble tail in panel three is a bit further from the edge. It actually seems to be emanating from the bush, which is now simply green, absent not only of flowers, but of black dots that signified flowers that have shed their petals. The bush speaks, "We had a good run this year." Is this another meta-commentary? Is the bush actually Bushmiller?

All of which brings us to today's strip. Nancy sits crosslegged on the floor, her laptop on her lap. "Reading social media all day is making me grumpy," she says, and her facial expression shows it. From outside the room, someone (Aunt Fritzi?) says, why don't you go outside? Nancy curtly answers "Fine." She still looks perturbed. Panel three's gag relies on the literalist Nancy established by Bushmiller, the Nancy who lounges with Sluggo in the "Lounge" and literally rests on someone's laurels. 

 In panel three, Nancy sits in the exact same position, legs crossed and laptop on her lap, only now, as the view pulls back a bit, we see that she is indeed outside. "Now there's glare on my screen!!!!" She has followed the advice given to her to its letter but not its intent. She is probably still reading social media as the sun shines down on her. But does the fact that Nancy sits among two trees and flower mean anything? Unlike the other two outdoor scenes this week, there are no bush(miller)es to be seen. Is Nancy free of the yoke of Bushmiller's long history? No--she is still reading the comments.

This Week in Nancy: "Be E(A)RNEST, DANG IT!"

I'm feeling compelled to write about Olivia Jaimes' Nancy reboot every week, so here goes.

In their exhaustive, detailed, and insightful book, How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels, Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden perform a detailed analysis of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy strip from Aug 8, 1948 in order to get at just what makes Bushmiller a master of the "gag." They examine the strip in whole and in parts--the images, the text, the word-ballon placement, the spacing, the background, the props, and as they write, the"details, details, details"--to work toward their conclusion that to make "good comics" one must understand "the hard-won language of all the great twentieth-century practitioners, a language exemplified by the clear, unambiguous example of Ernie Bushmiller" (158).

Does Olivia Jaimes' know Bushmiller's language? Can she speak it? Lots of people say "no." I say, "not so fast." As Karasik and Newgarden tell us, Bushmiller published his first comics as a teenager, and by the time he changed the name of his strip Fritzi Ritz to Nancy around June 11, 1938, he had been drawing Fritzi for more than ten years (58-59). And he didn't have Ernie Bushmiller as a guide. Nobody knows how long Olivia Jaimes has been making comics, but we do know that she has fifty years of Bushmiller's Nancy to contend with.

So what is she doing with this history? To my eye, she is "working backwards" with it. That is, Karasik and Newgarden write that Bushmiller often wrote the "gag" first. Bushmiller says "I draw the last panel first and work back toward the beginning, which is the opposite of the way you read (I hope)" (66). I don't know if Jaimes ever starts with the last panel, but today's strip seems most interesting if a reader considers the last panel first.

We end with a pun, a pun aimed directly at the new Nancy's critics. "You Hooligans, Be Earnest, Dang It!" says a crotchety-looking old guy, half out of the frame, shaking his fist at Nancy and Sluggo. Be Earnest . . . Be Ernest . . . Be Ernie . . . he might as well be saying. Nancy dismisses him with an emotionless "Nah." Here's the whole strip.

In the first panel, the old man looks toward Sluggo and Nancy and starts with a cliched "Kids these days." In the second panel, we see that he was concealing a mailbox from our view, so his claim that kids today "don't know how to mail letters" makes some sense. (I can't say the same for his "or write checks"). We see Nancy holding a letter; she and Sluggo look sleepy. The old man's speech balloon fills the top of the panel (the old man himself is off panel) with a long tail, as he explains that these two kids are exhibiting "an air of ironic detachment." Jaimes is trolling the trolls. She has set up a false dichotomy between the "earnest"  old man and the ironically detached kids, Nancy and Sluggo. The joke is on the reader. Are you an earnest Bushmiller purist or an ironic fan of the Nancy reboot? The battle grounds are staked.

But the dichotomy is false. Jaimes has been creating Nancy for less than a month.  She knows the Nancy vocabulary, but she only deploys small parts of it. Look at the balloon placement in the second panel. It's hideous and distorted. Or is it just a riff on the precision of Bushmiller's balloons? Is the weird inconsistent perspective on purpose, "on purpose," or neither?

On Monday, April 23, Jaimes anticipates Friday's old man with the picture in the "Age-Me App" that apparently allows you to "See Yourself Old." Jaimes has something invested in having Nancy and Sluggo use social media and apps. "NANCEE 22" gives the app 1/5 stars. Is this a comment on the online comments about Nancy? Is it?

On Tuesday, April 24, Jaimes breaks out Bushmiller's "Nancy sees Sluggo talking to another girl and gets jealous" trope. Only this time, Jaimes reveals that Sluggo's interest in the nameless girl is only because her parents "have accounts for HBO and Hulu." Sluggo must be dreaming of watching Game of Thrones. 

On Wednesday, April 25, Jaimes gives us Nancy lying in a dark room. Is that the voice of Aunt Fritzi?

Is this comic an homage to this one? Look at the blanket. But also look at Nancy drop the phone on her own face. She looks like a cyclops. That's funny.

On Thursday, April 26, we get Sluggo looking at Nancy's computer in panel one. In panel two, he seems inordinately angry that Nancy has "logged five hundred hours" on a game but hasn't "beaten any levels" yet. What the heck is she doing. In panel three, Nancy tells Sluggo "Oh I love that game." Sluggo must be wondering why she's so bad at it again. The gutter between the third and fourth panel shifts the scene. Nancy is now in bed, and we see the gag. "Nothing overheats my computer faster." We even see three (three!! Bushmiller's favorite number) little heat waves emanating from the laptop that sits atop Nancy's blanket. She plays the game only to overheat her computer to warm up her bed. Bushmiller's Nancy could get behind that logic.

 Of course, Bushmiller's Nancy would just invite some pets into her bed.

I'll end with a question, Does today's future, except for the "Earnest," know what bebop records are?