"I want the stupidest guy in the world to get the gag."
"I can smell and taste the average American. They just like to lead nice, gentle lives and read about everyday normal events."
"Nancy doesn't tell you what it's like to be a child. Nancy tells you what it's like to be a comic strip." — Bill Griffith
Ernie Bushmiller (1905-1982), the creator of the sassy girl Nancy, the immortal heroine of the eponymous comic strip, is the most exhaustively analyzed minimalist in the history of comics, a man to whom the avant-garde has paid decades of attention, and who would have found every word of it hilarious. He drew Nancy, he explained, for the "gum chewers," and proudly nicknamed himself "the Lawrence Welk of comics," after the bandleader everyone agreed was bland and everyone watched anyway. The famous exegesis of his method — the three background rocks that were always three, because two would be a pair of rocks and four would be some rocks plus one more than necessary — was performed by his admirers, not by him. He was a SLI laconic craftsman, and Nancy is fifty years of Si-Te functionalism so pure that the intellectuals mistook it for philosophy.
Bushmiller's Stamford routine ran on a craftsman's comfort-schedule: all six dailies produced between Sunday and Tuesday evening, two full days off, Friday for the Sunday page — the week's labor compressed to purchase the week's leisure, golf putted around the rock formation outside the studio, a couple of Heinekens, his wife and his pets.
Bushmiller's Stamford routine ran on a craftsman's comfort-schedule: all six dailies produced between Sunday and Tuesday evening, two full days off, Friday for the Sunday page — the week's labor compressed to purchase the week's leisure, golf putted around the rock formation outside the studio, a couple of Heinekens, his wife and his pets.
Bushmiller's reduction was an efficiency calculus: minimum elements, for maximum speed and universality of the laugh. His stated criteria are pure function: the strip must be read first on a crowded page, gotten at a glance, understood by "the stupidest guy in the world" and by the kid in Norway, because a slip on a banana peel is legible in any language. He built each strip backward from the gag in the final panel, instructed his assistants to "dumb everything down," and then edited like an accountant of ink: "I go over the completed strips like a telegram and cross out every word I don't absolutely need." The uniformity served the result, not the order. It is "minimum effort, maximum result" elevated into a fifty-year style, and mistaken for metaphysics by readers who could not believe anyone would work that hard merely to be instantly understood.
Nancy finding the proper use for a megaphone
There is a 256-page How To Read Nancy book, which analyses Bushmiller's technique in detail (I've heard whispered rumours of another, even thicker book, How To Read 'How To Read Nancy', which analyses the analysts, but was unable to locate it). For Bushmiller, these principles came naturally, resulting in a "masterpiece of reduction."
The gag-strip genre runs on a spark of Ne: the unexpected parallel, the literalized figure of speech, the object suddenly seen otherwise. By Bushmiller's own testimony it was the one thing that would not come: "That's the toughest part of the job, thinking up gags. I don't have a gag file and not much of a backlog, so I have to think them up as I go along." His Ne, while not unvalued, was clearly not that strong. Stuck for an idea, he paged through the Sears Roebuck catalog: "Usually my eye hits some article like an ironing board, and my mind starts to play around with what can be done with an ironing board, and I get an idea." The possibilities could not be summoned from the blue, they had to be triggered from the shelf. Bushmiller was a true innovator, breaking the fourth wall decades before it was fashionable: Nancy strolling up the wall onto the ceiling ("Anything can happen in a comic strip"), the whole scenery quaking because "their boss" was sharpening his pencil for a moment, the children meeting their own maker on the page. But notice that even here, every one of these inventions is the medium literalized as a physical object.
SLI carries powerful structural logic in the toolkit, without ever making order the point. An LSI who addressed children daily for half a century could not have resisted teaching them. Nancy contains nothing of the kind. Fifty years, some fifteen thousand strips, and not one lesson — and the authority figures of its world, the dapper Aunt Fritzi with her hairbrush (the original star of the comic, invented by Larry Whittington before Bushmiller took over), the policemen, the truant officers, are gag targets at least as often as the children are.
Nancy violating(?) the rules
Nancy's universe is the cozy concrete: ice-cream cones, naps, lawn sprinklers, squirt guns, radios, refrigerators, the fence, the hedge, the hammock — the small physical comforts and small physical nuisances of a generic suburban forever-summer. The gags are told from a child's eye height, the setting never leaves the domestic perimeter. And the temperament of its humor completes the picture, in his own words: "I don't like cruel humor. I don't like the night club humor, insult humor, where you have to make fun of somebody. I like a gentle type of humor." Of his two little stars: "They may be brats, but they don't play with meat choppers or dangerous weapons. I don't let them do anything vicious." The visual minimalism and simple themes of the comic do even correspond to weak and tertiary "strategy/symbolism" and "result/simplification" Reinin traits. Bushmiller also wasn't particularly concerned with grand world issues neither in comics, nor in real life, and this also fits SLI, who scores the least as far as grand world issues are concerned.
The strip's typical violence
His creation became immortal — Nancy continued after his death until the present day. His successors failed to completely capture the original Nancy's unique spirit, with their approaches being described as too moralistic or shmaltzy (the longtime Gilchrist run being the byword), although Nancy's re-incarnation by Olivia James, who modernized the strip to present day, allegedly came close. Nancy is now in the hands of another artist, Caroline Cash, who continues James' general approach.
Modern 'Nancy', by Olivia James, with Aunt Fritzi (and even Nancy herself) now having a laptop
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