I'm Really Getting Into Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy
When I was a child my father used to tell me all sorts of weird, random, possibly untrue things. He told me, for example, that Walt Disney had himself cryogenically frozen, and that the climax of Disney on Ice involved his body being publicly displayed.
He also told me that Billy Joel had written and performed a song called “Just the Way You Are” about how he would always love his wife and manager Elizabeth Weber, then divorced her so that he could marry the world’s top super-model, Christie Brinkley.
Yes, my dad is a weird guy who told me all sorts of weird things growing up that stuck with me for one reason or another.
One of the many weird things my dad told my 10 year old self was that Nancy creator Ernie Bushmiller relied primarily on ghost-writers, who he would explicitly instruct not to create strips that were funny because that would go against the strip’s entire aesthetic.
My dad fucking hated Ernie Bushmiller for reasons I don’t quite understand. I similarly don’t know where my father got his information from but it had an unmistakable effect on me.
I grew up worshipping cartoons and cartoonists, primarily Charles Schultz, Bill Watterson, Gary Larson and Berkley Breathed but I dismissed Nancy as being a Garfield-like mediocrity.
I have a much more passive relationship with comic strips and their creators these days but one of the contemporary comic strips I absolutely fucking adore, along with everyone else, is the current incarnation of Nancy, which is being pseudonymously written and drawn under the pen name Olivia Jaimes.
Jaimes took a comic strip that had devolved into cutesy, sentimental nonsense by Guy Gilchrist and his brother Brad during their time creating the comic strip between 1995 and 2018 and transformed it into the hippest, funniest, hottest comic strip around.
Jaimes recreated Nancy for the age of smart-phones and social media. I was so impressed by Jaimes that I joined an old school Nancy Facebook group and discovered that my father was wrong all along.
Bushmiller was one hell of a gag writer. There’s a rock-solid simplicity to the jokes as well as the look that can’t help but remind me of the greatest comic strip of all time, Peanuts.
And the characters! My goodness Nancy is a great character, a wonderfully abrasive smart-ass and natural born rebel. Nancy doesn’t look or act or talk anything like girls at the time were supposed to. That’s a big part of what makes her such a delight.
I’m equally enamored of Sluggo, the most working class figure in the history of comic strips. I love that Sluggo canonically lives in a slanty shanty with a drooped roof and peeling ceiling. For lack of a better word, I have discovered that Sluggo is, in fact, Lit.
Sometimes getting older entails becoming more conservative and fearful with each successive year. Sometimes it involves discovering religion and giving up youthful vices. For me, getting older is all about discovering the old-fashioned, rock-solid craftsmanship of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy.
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