Nancy and Sluggo's Guide to Life: Comics about Money, Food, and Other Essentials

by Ernie Bushmiller, Denis Kitchen (Foreword by)

Overview

If you were alive in twentieth-century America, you knew Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy—and this new collection assembles some of the greatest strips featuring the much-loved cartoon icon and her pug-nosed companion, Sluggo.

The newspaper cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller once admitted that “all my characters are conceived in desperation.” Nancy was no exception. She was the niece of the star of his other strip, Fritzi Ritzi, and meant to serve as a throwaway gag character. But Nancy could not be contained: Within a few years, Bushmiller’s strip had been renamed for her, and she had begun her ascent into the pantheon of cartooning greats.

Nancy, along with on-and-off boyfriend Sluggo, delivered absurd laughs to readers for decades, all rendered in Bushmiller’s distinctive line that cartoonist Denis Kitchen once called “geometric perfection.” A masterpiece of humor and cartooning, Nancy earned both scorn and acclaim for decades, serving as a muse (and sometimes punching bag) for the likes of Andy Warhol, Joe Brainard, Gary Panter, Matt Groening, and more.

This collection of Bushmiller’s Nancy brings together a selection from the beloved Kitchen Sink Press editions of Nancy strips, including How Sluggo Survives! and Nancy Eats Food, as well as a number of newly selected cartoons.

Together, this wide-ranging collection offers a chance for readers to experience the full range of Bushmiller’s absurd humor and unexpected visual delights. As Nancy once said: “Anything can happen in a comic strip!”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681378367
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	05/14/2024
Pages:	148
Product dimensions:	10.90(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Ernie Bushmiller (1905–1982) was an American cartoonist best known for creating the daily comic strip Nancy, which has remained in print since 1938. After completing the eighth grade, Bushmiller dropped out of school and began working as a copy boy at the New York World. There, he ran errands, observed his cartoonist colleagues, and eventually picked up illustration assignments such as lettering speech balloons and designing crossword puzzles. In 1925, he was given the chance to take over Larry Whittington’s comic strip Fritzi Ritz, which evolved into the long-running strip Nancy.

Denis Kitchen is a cartoonist, writer, and publisher. In 1969, after the success of his self-published Mom’s Homemade Comics, Kitchen launched Kitchen Sink Press to publish his own work and the work of other underground cartoonists. In its thirty-year run, Kitchen Sink published work by both new and older cartoonists including R. Crumb, Alice Kominsky-Crumb, Will Eisner, Milton Caniff, Charles Burns, Alan Moore, M. K. Brown, and Ernie Bushmiller. A monograph of Kitchen’s own work, The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen, was published in 2010 by Dark Horse Comics and was nominated for both Harvey and Eisner Awards. Originally from Wisconsin, he now lives in Western Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running comic strip, Nancy, helped establish the way we think visually.” —The Atlantic

“Bushmiller refined his art, honed it to its barest essentials, and thereby produced a comic strip that in many respects was the very apotheosis of a comic strip.” —The Comics Journal

“Bushmiller choreographed his familiar formal elements inside the tightest frame of any major strip, and that helped make it the most beautiful, as a whole, of any in the papers.” —The Village Voice

“[A] sturdy American product and often a good chuckle.” —The New York Times

“Nancy invites us to meditate on Bushmiller’s iconic landscape. She is pure Zen.” —Bill Griffith, author of Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy

“Universalizing historians have given the newspaper comic strip a distinguished pedigree as the twentieth-century descendant of sacred Egyptian hieroglyphics. True or not, no classic strip was better suited to embellish the inner sanctum of Pharaoh Tut’s tomb than Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running tot saga Nancy.... If Bushmiller was the comic-strip artist’s comic-strip artist, Nancy was a trademark to rival Coca-Cola’s logo.” —J. Hoberman, Artforum

“It is possible that Nancy is the best comic today, principally because it combines a very strong, independent imagination with simplification of the best tradition of comic drawing.” —The New Republic

“Here are vintage selections from Nancy, the comic strip that continues to this day but was perfected to a zen-like simplicity for 44 years by Ernie Bushmiller. Astute choices reveal an amusing perspective and useful advice.” —Michael Giltz, Parade Magazine

“Subtleties include Bushmiller’s mastery of panel spacing, object inclusion, balloon placement, and use of solid black—details easily missed by an original audience reading the strip in a cheaply printed and disposable format over breakfast…. New York Review Comics has just published a new Bushmiller collection, Nancy & Sluggo’s Guide to Life, that restores some of the finest and best-loved strips to print. If you want to know what it’s like to be a comic strip, you need to get your mitts on a copy.” —Michael Robbins, Book Post

“This curated collection of Bushmiller strips, culled from three books published by Kitchen Sink Press in the 1980s with some additional material, brings the prime era of Nancy back into the public’s hands.” —Frank M. Young, The Comics Journal
 
“One terrific strip has Nancy being swatted by a giant mosquito; another has ghouls, ghosts and devils chasing her through her dreams and inspiring her to open a haunted house. All of them, through that peculiar Bushmiller magic, take longer to describe than they do to read and enjoy.” —Sam Thielman, The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher