A High-Water Mark in American Mass Culture
The great cartoonist Wally Wood once observed that not reading Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running newspaper comic strip, Nancy, is harder than reading it. Its minimalism makes the strip into something like a stop sign or a middle finger—it’s just there, all of a sudden, and you may find yourself responding to it before you’re ready to do so. This suddenness is part of what makes Nancy so funny. In many ways, the strip is a series of jokes about the nature of jokes. Despite the two rambunctious kids, Nancy and Sluggo, at its center, it’s not about childhood, like Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes are. And, despite its surrealism, it’s not about the silliness of life, like The Far Side is. It’s about the rules of comics, which Bushmiller made so clear that the reader can understand them at the first, most casual glance at one of his strips. A deeper look—which Nancy resists with all its might—suggests that Bushmiller’s great contribution to popular culture was the way he understood language itself.
Take, for example, a strip that and then repeating the ink stain over and over again, with disorienting perfection, turning the mistake into a wallpaper pattern. Another has Sluggo and holding it up upside down against a picture of his own face, because “I wanted to see what I’d look like with a beard.” It takes much longer to describe these panels than it does to read them. Your brain says that one ink stain is an error, but the same ink stain repeated exactly is a design. Hair turned upside down equals a beard. And then you laugh.
