Review by Woodrow Phoenix

There was a time when original art pages for Ernie Bushmiller’s canonic comic strip could be bought very cheaply relative to other classic American newspaper strips. Many buyers were comics professionals or other artists and collectors who recognised the brilliance in this work most people unconnected to the industry couldn’t see. In the 1990s interest and appreciation for the craft and the smarts of Bushmiller began to rise as a few book collections were published and now Nancy art is a valuable commodity. The Nancy Show: Celebrating the Art of Ernie Bushmiller is a 152-page catalogue of items displayed at “The Nancy Show”, a 2024 exhibition at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

This landscape format, flexicover book presents reproductions of strips displayed in the museum show from the collections of Denis Kitchen, Mark Newgarden, Patrick McDonnell, Brian Walker, Tom Gammill and the museum itself. Brian Walker, curator of the exhibition and also author/editor of one of the earliest Nancy reprint collections The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy introduces this book with an informative biography of Bushmiller accompanied by lots of great pictures. There’s a reprint of a piece written by Bushmiller himself for Collier’s Magazine in 1948 called ‘Nancy and Me’, and a fun infographic-style ‘How to Read Nancy’s Face’ piece by Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden, co-authors of the Eisner-winning How To Read Nancy. ‘My forty years collecting Nancy’ by Tom Gammill features insightful commentary on selected pieces of Bushmiller’s artwork and a gallery of merchandise from sewing kits, dolls and toys to toothbrushes and pencil sharpeners.

The two central chapters in this book are ‘The Artwork’, and ‘The Strips’. ‘The Artwork’ is reproductions of original Bushmiller strips; 80 dailies and 24 Sundays for Nancy and two dailies and eight Sundays for Fritzi Ritz. These are reduced but uncropped, with occasional margin notes and paste-up marks visible, and publication dates beneath. There’s no information about the size of the originals, but on the inside front cover and endpaper you can see part of an actual size original strip, an unfinished Sunday. ‘The Strips’ shows us a great selection of 34 colour Nancy and three Fritzi Ritz Sunday strips from 1937 to 1965 restored and presented one to a page, most never reprinted before, looking crisp and clean. The last chapter ‘Beyond Bushmiller’ shows us some tributes and observations from other artists including Bill Griffith and Patrick McDonnell, and we get to see a sample of Ivan Brunetti’s tryout strips from his attempt to get the job of drawing Nancy when that position became vacant in 1994.

This book also comes with some Nancy ‘gift-wrap’, a collage of panels on a thin sheet of paper that you could wrap it in if you were buying it for someone else. It’s too nice to give away though unless you’re buying two copies. This is a very well-presented collection of art that entertains while illuminating Bushmiller’s process and at list price it’s a total bargain. Don’t wait till it’s out of print.