I was just 6 years old when this Nancy cartoon was published, but Nancy had already been going for 12 years as a stand alone cartoon strip. I was always fascinated by any sort of drawing as a boy and Nancy cartoons were in there with the best of them. However as I got older I began to see them as something almost akin to a type of visual philosophy.
Then I got older still and found out that other artists had also seen Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy as a philosophical conundrum. Bill Griffith had this to say about Nancy, “Peanuts tells you what it’s like to be a child. Nancy tells you what it’s like to be a comic strip.” Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden have written a book on Ernie Bushmiller’s work, 'How to read Nancy'. They point to the comic strip's three-panel minimalism and compare its underlying aesthetic philosophy to the “less is more” architect Mies van der Rohe. They state that every element in a “Nancy” panel adheres not to a comic strip but rather to “the blueprint of a comic strip.” Everything in a Nancy panel is in crucial service to the gag, free of the fussiness of embellishment. The Zen-like nature of some of the Nancy panels has been commented on by Art Spiegelman, Scott McCloud and Bill Griffith, who has recently been producing a book on Bushmiller’s work. The 'Three Rocks' issue is of particular fascination. Scott McCloud quotes Art Spiegelman in his rules for the card game “5-Card Nancy”; “Art Spiegelman explains how a drawing of three rocks in a background scene was Ernie’s way of showing us there were some rocks in the background. It was always three. Why? Because two rocks wouldn’t be ‘some rocks.’ Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. And four rocks was unacceptable because four rocks would indicate ‘some rocks’ BUT IT WOULD BE ONE ROCK MORE THAN WAS NECESSARY TO CONVEY THE IDEA OF ‘SOME ROCKS."
Scott McCloud has this to say;
"Why Nancy?
Ernie Bushmiller's comic strip Nancy is a landmark achievement: A comic so simply drawn it can be reduced to the size of a postage stamp and still be legible; an approach so formulaic as to become the very definition of the "gag-strip"; a sense of humour so obscure, so mute, so without malice as to allow faithful readers to march through whole decades of art and story without ever once cracking a smile. Nancy is Plato's playground. Ernie Bushmiller didn't draw A tree, A house, A car. Oh, no. Ernie Bushmiller drew THE tree, THE house, THE car."As well as the three rocks, if you look at the cloud and the two trees in the panel above you can see why people philosophise about Bushmiller's comic strip, that cloud and those trees are sort of numb, an ontological* image of a cloud, or of a stand of trees but no more.
It is said that invention often arrives out of boredom and perhaps that's part of the Nancy mystique, because there are no visual extras, we are left with a space for the mind to fill.
This is however Nancy's book not Bushmiller's, but I think the point is made. Art doesn't imitate life, it extracts from it and simplifies it and that simplification allows us to think about the very life that has been simplified, because real life is far too complicated to think about.
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