It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! This year, the theme is A Comic Strip Christmas! Each day will spotlight a notable comic strip, and at least three Christmas-themed comics from that strip. Today's comic is Nancy.
Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened, and you can see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries.
The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Santa Claus giving out presents to comic strip kids (although instead of a present for Charlie Brown, his dog, Snoopy, gets a present instead), is by Nick Perks.
Day 9 is now opened (once opened, the door will feature an image from the featured comic strip)...
WHAT IS NANCY?
In October 1922, so yes, over A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, Larry Whittington launched a syndicated comic strip called Fritzi Ritz, about a young flapper. This was an era where comic strips about flappers were "hot" (I'll feature another flapper comic strip that evolved into something dramatically different later this month) and Fritzi Ritz did well enough, but after less than three years on the strip, Whittington left. Ernie Bushmiller was hired to take over the feature, and he continued Fritzi's adventures, although he slowly altered her appearance to make her look like his own fiancée at the time. Still, though, he maintained her general "pinup girl" look.
In 1933, Fritzi's niece, Nancy, comes to visit her. The response to the young girl was so strong that Bushmiller decided to just add Nancy to the cast of the strip full-time. Soon, Nancy became so popular that by 1938, the strip was re-named Nancy, with Fritzi now more of a supporting figure as Nancy's guardian. At the same time, Nancy's best friend, Sluggo Smith, was added to the strip as a regular character. The amusing thing was around this time, Nancy got her own Sunday strip, as well as taking over Fritzi's daily strip, but Fritzi's Sunday strip ALSO continued for another thirty years! The Fritzi in the Sunday strips had her own continuity.
Bushmiller initially had some continuity in the strip, but he eventually moved to a gag-a-day format, and he soon became a master of the format, amazing people with the brilliant simplicity of his artwork. Scott McCloud famously described Bushmiller's skills in the following way:
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 humor 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. Much has been made of the "three rocks." 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." A Nancy panel is an irreduceable concept, an atom, and the comic strip is a molecule.
Bushmiller remained on the strip until he had to retire soon before he passed away in 1982. After a tragically brief stint by Mark Lasky (who died of cancer before he even turned 30 years old), Jerry Scott took over the feature in 1983 (and then took over the Sunday strip from Bushmiller's initial replacement, Al Plastino, in 1985). Scott left the strip in 1984 and Guy Gilchrist took it over and remained on the feature until his retirement in 2018. Gilchrist's strip was basically unrecognizable from the earlier versions of the character, as he did his own thing. Olivia Jaimes (a pseudonym) took over the strip upon Gilchrist's retirement and Jaimes has brought the strip very much back to the Bushmiller approach, just with a modern twist. It's become one of the most acclaimed comic strips around, which is quite an accomplishment for a strip whose REVAMP took place over 80 years ago!
HOW DID NANCY HANDLE CHRISTMAS?
First off, see how Bushmiller still drew Fritzi as basically a pinup girl, even as she was now the guardian of Nancy? In any event, this Christmas ship shows you the oddball humor of the strip well...
Click here to enlarge the strip.
So does this one about Nancy putting together a "stocking" made out of meat for her dog...
Click here to enlarge the strip.
And this one about Nancy enjoying the hole blown into the ceiling of their living room, as now it meant that they had more room for a bigger Christmas tree!
Click here to enlarge the strip.
Mostly, Bushmiller just went for oddball jokes, but occasionally, he would make "commentary," like a department store Santa Claus who passes out when a kid DOESN'T want anything from him...
Click here to enlarge the strip.
This bit was odd because Bushmiller had used the same exact joke before (with Nancy booing a nice old man in a TV show because she remembered him from a TV show where he was the bad guy)...
Click here to enlarge the strip.
Bushmiller, at his best, though, was just an oddball, and brilliantly oddball, like this bit with Nancy giving Santa some help...
Click here to enlarge the strip.
and this one, about Nancy feeling bad for the mouse in "'Twas the Night Before Christmas"...
Click here to enlarge the strip.
Guy Gilchrist...Guy Gilchrist. He had a few things that interested him a lot, and he worked them into Nancy strips whether it made sense or not. He liked classic rock and roll, he was big into Christianity, and he liked drawing cheesecake (his Fritzi went all the way back to pinup girl). So you got stuff like this "Kiss-mas" joke...
Click here to enlarge the strip.
and then this oddly earnestly religious Christmas strip...
Click here to enlarge the strip.
Okay, so Olivia Jaimes is now on the strip, and her work is much more in the vein of the Bushmiller oddball jokes, like this extremely well told joke about ornaments...
Click here to enlarge the strip.
But Jaimes is also very modern, like this brilliant take on autism and how it affects people's ability to thank people for giving gifts...
Click here to enlarge the strip.
Go read Nancy, people! It's such a good strip.