In the world of Ernie Bushmiller's classic comic strip, "Nancy," it was all about the gag.
"It was whatever works," Paul Karasik says. "Maybe you look inside Nancy's brain, or Ernie's hand suddenly jams in the final panel, anything to deliver the goods. Everything was up for grabs."
Karasik and fellow illustrator/educator Mark Newgarden have written a new book, "How To Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels" (Fantagraphics), based on a famous essay they once penned about the long-running comic strip. The duo will be in Richmond on April 2 to talk with Virginia Commonwealth University art students, and give a lecture at the Cabell Library on why they think Ernie Bushmiller is an important figure in the history of comics.
"He really kept alive that visual aspect even after other comic strips had become more character-focused, more dialogue-driven," says co-author Newgarden, who helped to create the Garbage Pail Kids trading card series. "He stuck out, especially for readers of our generation. He seems sort of like the sole survivor of the [older] comic strip era."
Among the book's many exhaustive chapters is a biography they've written about the late South Bronx, New York-born artist who, even after 44 years on the comic pages, remained something of a cypher to fans and fellow illustrators. "Bushmiller was determined to be a cartoonist, almost from birth," Karasik, a former associate editor of Raw magazine, says. "So we got to write the biography of this man whose life story has sort of the story arc of the 20th-century newspaper industry." Ernie was a master of joke construction, Karasik adds, and once worked as a gag writer for silent comedian Harold Lloyd. "We did a lot of leg work, and dug up the very first signed piece that he ever did, for the New York World, when he was 15," adds Newgarden.
Nancy's creator wasn't so mysterious, it turns out. "The reason we never knew much about him was that he was a private person," Karasik says. "Unlike some of the other cartoonists, who led more public lives, Bushmiller was busy making comics."
The duo's journey through "Nancy" began with an essay they wrote on the strip for a 1988 anthology of vintage funnies. Their overview became a famous treatise that caused many to reevaluate the strip, and has been taught over the years in university courses on cartooning. "The original essay was an assignment to do something on 'Nancy,' " Karasik recalls, "and so we thought about deconstructing a single strip. The rest is history."
That detailed examination of one "Nancy" installment from 1959 — involving our heroine, her pal/nemesis Sluggo and a water hose in a gun holster — is also in the book. This dissection pares everything in the comic down to its different parts, examining the panel sizes, spatial relationship of the figures, word balloon placement, the use of black ink, even the direction of the horizon line (which, unfortunately, doesn't contain the three distinctive Bushmiller background rocks this time). The three-panel strip is simple — taking less than two seconds to scan — but the authors reveal a startling complexity. It's a reminder that the secret to Bushmiller's strip, cartoonist Wally Wood once quipped, was that by the time you decided not to read it, you already had.
But what do today's student illustrators make of Nancy, who debuted as a character in her aunt Fritzi Ritz's strip back in 1933 and is still being drawn today by contemporary hands? "I used to save my 'Deconstructing Nancy' lecture [until] halfway during the semester, after my students had been learning the basics about comics," says Karasik, who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, "but I found that presenting that lecture right up front prevents them from making a lot of the stupid, boneheaded mistakes that beginning cartoonists make."
It turns out, for the most part, that the students already know Nancy. She's omnipresent in popular culture — in the art of Andy Warhol and Joe Brainard, the underground comic pages of Zippy the Pinhead, a card game created by artist Scott McCloud, and — reminds Newgarden, who teaches at several schools, including the Parsons School of Design — as an icon of punk rock. "Remember those popular 'Sid and Nancy' T-shirts? Nancy was certainly picked up by the punk rockers back in the '70s and '80s," he says. "The students today tend to really respond to the strip, or really not. But I'm happy to report that most of them are engaged."
She was an early punk-rocker, for sure — that haircut! — but Karasik says that Nancy is far more important as a protofeminist. "A lot of women read 'Nancy' as little girls, and there weren't a lot of girls on the comics page as intelligent, clever and kid-like, and smart and problem-solving as Nancy."
Through their slavish analysis, the duo's admiration for Ernie Bushmiller's strip shines through. Over the years, Newgarden admits that he has tried to sneak Nancy into his paid work. "I actually designed a Garbage Pail Kid for Nancy, but it was rejected. By everybody." What was the gag? "There was no gag. It was just a Garbage Pail Kid Nancy, walking down the sidewalk with an ice cream cone ... three rocks in the background," he says, laughing.
Bushmiller's most famous quote was that his cartooning secret was to "dumb it down." So why have two smart dudes like Karasik and Newgarden spent 10 years of their lives studying "Nancy"? "It's fun to look at these comic strips that you take completely for granted," Karasik says, "and have a whole universe opened up, a whole way of thinking and seeing that is surprisingly complex while, at first glance, that art may just seem meager and disposable."
"How to Read Nancy," a talk with Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik, comes to the James Branch Cabell Library, 901 Park Ave., Room 303, on April 2. 7 p.m. Free.
