Everything I Need to Know I Learned From Nancy

1993, possibly first edition, from Pharos Books
Ernie Bushmiller, conceived and compiled by Kevin McDonough
Everything I Need to Know I Learned From Nancy
Bought newish for $6.95
Slightly worn paperback
C+

McDonough takes Nancy strips (most of them from the Kitchen Sink collections) and comes up with "lessons," the best of which is "Don't be so quick to condemn bizarre behavior."  There's not much original here but the book is cute.  Obviously, I've read it less than the other Nancy books.  This title comes from the still-referenced All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1988), which I've never read, but the title implies that the book is unnecessary.

Nancy's Pets

1991, first edition, from Kitchen Sink Press
Ernie Bushmiller
Nancy's Pets
Bought newish for $8.95
Worn paperback
C+

And this is the not only the last but the weakest of the Kitchen Sink Nancy collections.  For one thing, the introduction by the Bushmillers' neighbor is nice, but it's more about their lives than about the strip (including its oddities, which all the other introducers have remarked on).  Some of the animal pictures are cute but I didn't think the writing was as creative as usual, except for the strange Sunday strip where Sluggo learns he can't take out a library book, How to Build a Dog House, without a card.  Instead of applying for a card, he and Nancy return with lumber, nails, a hammer, and a saw!  Sometimes those kids really do things the hard way (how do they think they're gonna take the doghouse through the door, if they don't get kicked out first for being noisy?), again for the sake of a dumb joke.

Nancy: Bums, Beatniks and Hippies/ Artists & Con Artists

1991, first edition, from Kitchen Sink Press
Ernie Bushmiller
Nancy: Bums, Beatniks and Hippies/ Artists & Con Artists
Bought newish for $8.95
Worn paperback
B

This is the best of the Nancy collections, mostly because of the dual subject matter, although the "artists" half is not quite as good as that of the patch-and-bindle set.  And, yes, many of the strips have appeared elsewhere, but it's still great to see Nancy and friends deal with "modern," "alternative" people.  One of the best strips is first (at least if you start on this side, rather than flip it over and begin at the other end).  Sluggo says, "I'm bored--I think I'll become a beatnik" (emphasis in the original).  In the very next panel, he's acquired a beret, dark shades, and a phony goatee.  He speaks in rhyme but does not play the bongos or perform any other cliched beatnik activity.  But later strips fill in the gaps.  Nancy (or Bushmiller) is so square that the (counter-)culture clash works, and there's also more satire than you get when she's dealing with food (or pets as we'll see shortly).

The other side has some nice little parodies of modern art (check out the 1940s take on surrealism), but it's more one-note.  When Sluggo gets a guitar and a Beatles wig to regain Nancy's interest, anything can happen, as long as it leads to a stupid joke.

Nancy: Dreams and Schemes

1990, first edition, from Kitchen Sink Press
Ernie Bushmiller
Nancy: Dreams and Schemes
Bought newish for $7.95
Worn paperback
B-

Even more than before, there are comics that have been featured in the earlier collections, but there's enough here of interest, including surrealism, and not just when Nancy's dreaming.  Roy Blount, Jr.'s introduction assumes that it's Nancy having the dreams because "Lord knows they don't seem like anything a grown man would have," but I'd argue that a grown man like Bushmiller definitely would.  Blount was a "charter member of the Bushmiller Society" but seems just as confused as anyone about the paradoxes of Nancy's world.  Even when it's set in "the real world" rather than Nancy's night and daydreams, it's pretty bizarre.

Let me take just one strip as an example (I could provide you with dozens), in this case where their walk-on pal Eddie looks grim and Sluggo asks why the long face.  Instead of telling them, Eddie says, "I just feel grumpy."  Sluggo tells Nancy it's too nice a morning for a long face.  In the penultimate panel, they see something startling offpage.  Then with exaggeratedly long faces, they walk towards a sign that says, "SCHOOL OPENS TODAY."  The disconnect with reality here is not so much the cartoonish faces, since that comes with the territory, as that somehow no one (not Eddie, not Aunt Fritzi) has told them about school opening today.  What if they hadn't seen the sign?  And what kid over the age of five doesn't count down the weeks and then days till school starts?  As always with Bushmiller, everything is sacrificed for the joke.  And presumably this is not the same school year (I think from the 1960s) when Nancy and Fritzi both develop crushes on the 1932-handsome teacher.

Bushmiller is more timely at times, as with a Khrushchev caricature.  But if you want topical, stay tuned for the next collection, where Nancy takes on not only modern art but "Bums, Beatniks and Hippies"....

How Sluggo Survives!

1989, first edition, from Kitchen Sink Press
Ernie Bushmiller
How Sluggo Survives!
Bought newish for $7.95
Worn paperback
B-

The focus this time is on Nancy's boyfriend Sluggo.  Why does a seven-year-old (or ten-year-old or whatever she is) have a boyfriend?  Not only that, why do both of them consider themselves engaged to be engaged?  If you find that odd, you'll also wonder why Nancy pressures Sluggo to get a job.  He gets several, the most prominent here as an office boy, to a cranky man with a mustache. 

Sluggo lives in a "slanty shanty" with broken windows, broken furniture, cracked walls, and junk in the yard, so poor that burglars feel sorry for him.  He seems to live alone, although he'll sometimes refer to "we."  Not just in this volume, but in all my Nancy collections, his parents are never mentioned, although he does have a few aunts and uncles who live locally but separately (some quite well off).  As with Nancy's eating disorder, you can't let realism intrude.  Otherwise, Sluggo's survival would be a very serious question.

Sluggo, with his N'Yawk accent, definitely is tough enough to survive, even when menaced by bullies.  He's incredibly confident and as ingenious as Nancy.  Even when things go wrong, he keeps going.  And although he, like Nancy, never gets any older, he imagines that he'll be a great success as an adult, maybe even President.  I guess that's how to survive, by believing that you'll thrive.

Nancy Eats Food

1989, first edition, from Kitchen Sink Press
Ernie Bushmiller
Nancy Eats Food
Bought newish for $7.95
Very worn paperback with broken spine
B-

As the title suggests, Bushmiller riffs on a very basic concept, although there are some surprises along the way.  One is that Nancy, who at one point in one of these books says she's seven, acts more like a young teen, sometimes cooking (albeit badly) and getting crushes.  At one point she even stomps grapes for wine!  She also worries about her weight, but then so do the adults around her (worry about Nancy's weight), not just Aunt Fritzi but strangers.  Is there a subtext that she's bulimic?  Not likely, since Bushmiller's world is unchanging.  Nancy can eat food, or diet and exercise, and maintain the same chunky figure that all the kids have, even the "cute blondes" that Sluggo goes after.

The back cover shows panels of a strip where Nancy's original recipe for chili is nuclear-hot.  It also has quotes from Bill "Zippy the Pinhead" Griffith's introduction; Art Spiegelman, who says "someone" said it takes more effort not to read Nancy than to read it; and Roy Blount, Jr.  (Blount would go on to contribute a Nancy intro of his own.)

Some of the strips here also appeared in Walker's book, which is understandable.  Less forgivable is that Kitchen Sink would reuse some that fell under future themes, but I won't mark this book down for that.  Overall, this is nice kick-off to the series, although some of the views of Nancy eating look a bit Freudian, especially when she's got two bananas.

The Best of Ernie Bushmiller's "Nancy"

1988, first edition, from Holt and Company
Brian Walker
The Best of Ernie Bushmiller's "Nancy"
Bought newish for $10.95
Worn paperback
B-

I didn't grow up reading Nancy, or not so's I can remember.  As someone once noted, it's easier to read Nancy than to not read it.  Bushmiller designed the strip to be taken in without thinking, with seemingly simple artwork and writing, with strong black lines and geometric patterns.  He died in 1982, when I was 14 and "outgrowing" the comics.  But I can't recall any strips from earlier, while there is a Broom Hilda that I can still visualize because of the way the three main characters' elbows looked when they walked quickly.  I don't have any Broom Hilda collections, but I have quite a few for Nancy.

I'm going to blame The Harvard Lampoon Big Book of College Life, because it contains a "lecture" on Nancy & Nihilism.  A decade before this book, it juxtaposed (pseudo)-intellectuals and what is often regarded as one of the dumbest comic strips ever.  As Walker shows, many avante-garde artists from the '60s onward appreciated the strip.  And in the '50s MAD found it an easy target. 

Is Nancy so bad-it's-good?  Is it a basic but satisfying comic?  I don't know.  It rarely makes me laugh, and always at rather than with.  In some ways, I think it was more intriguing when it focused on Nancy's sexy flapper/actress aunt Fritzi.  Nonetheless, we've got all five of the Kitchen Sink Press G.H.W.Bush-era collections awaiting us....