The Nancy strip is dreadfully dull and boring, but so was Ernie Bushmiller's strip, as I recall.
That's why I don't understand Nancy fandom, where otherwise intelligent people praise Ernie Bushmiller's "surrealistic" imagination. Bushmiller's Nancy jokes were seldom funny and the punch lines were frequently baffling non sequiturs that seemed stupid, not clever. But Nancy went on year after year and heaven forfend, she's still with us!
I gotta say that for the first time in my life I can say something positive about Bushmiller's cartooning. It was a damned sight more professional than the present artist's work. The skinny, computer-crisp outlines emphasize how flat and lifeless the drawings are. Pfui, says I!
What caught my attention is that the strips on the landing page come from a variety of different syndicates--or are unsyndicated--but they all appear under the banner of Andrews McNeel. I knew Andrews McNeel as a book publisher. They published the US Calvin and Hobbes collections, for example. Here they seem to be a licensing firm, a middle-man between the strips' owners and people who want to reproduce them for some project.
I sampled a number of the strips at random and didn't dissolve into gales of laughter. It was annoying that the site presented some sequential strips in reverse order. I wonder why they run only the first panels of Doonesbury strips.
The character of Nancy DID, however, get to experience a short 'Golden Era", from Spring 1959 through early 1962, when longtime Dell storywriter/storyboarder and penciling artist, John Stanley, who had tired of his, then 13 year assignment with the comic book "Little Lulu" stories, was transferred over to Dell's flagging "Nancy" books. He revived that series, by making both Nancy and Sluggo more energetic and dynamic characters, and also expanded their characters to being more well-rounded. And, he expanded the character of Sluggo's neighbour, who was also his landlord and surrogate "guardian", as the boy was a runaway orphan. The strip had some edgy possibilities. Stanley added a mixed adversarial and father/son-style relationship between them. He also added new characters to develop a vehicle for a real surrealistic atmosphere some of the Nancy stories could attain. These were a potential playmate for Nancy, named Oona Goosepimple. She always wore all black, had pasty-white ghoulish appearing skin, and behaved very weirdly. She resided with her aunt, who was a practising witch, and an uncle (not married to the aunt), who was a magician, and a cousin, who was a giant, who had a whole wing of their house to himself, just to house his body. The house, of course, looked like a typical abandoned haunted house. Behind its fireplace in the drawing/sitting room, where Oona often took Nancy, laid a different dimension, which was a surrealistic world, in which an unearthly species of beings having magical powers dwelt. The surrealistic situations were interesting, and the stories were inventive, and had clever dialogue and endings. It was more like the clever Stanley Little Lulu comic book stories.
Have you come across any of these '59-'62 Nancy comic book stories? If not, I could send you scans of a few.
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Topic: Major Australian newspapers have cut out comics (Read 1651 times)
