Nancy Classics by Ernie Bushmiller for December 08, 2018

By now, you would think that Fritzi would be wise to Nancy’s deviousness.

‘Stone Age tech’ joke.

Yo, Fritzi! Read much?

Wonder if the crackers were “Ritz” crackers! Love the detail of the curtain behind Aunt Fritzi, separating the rooms! Once upon a time, most rooms were separated by curtains rather than doors! If you catch older episodes of even shows like Perry mason (50s-60s) – you will still see rooms separated by curtains. When I grew up, there was a curtain separating the dining room from the living room. That way, guests could go into the living room after dinner and you could pull the curtain between the rooms, so the dinner guests didn’t have to watch whoever was cleaning up the dinner dishes and carrying them into the kitchen. There was usually a swinging door between the kitchen and dining room – so guests could dine in pleasure, without looking at the littered kitchen – but the cook could move in and our of the swinging door between the kitchen and dining room without spilling anything from the dishes being carried in both hands.

To my son Homer… (Homer says Woohoo!) …and his entire family… (D’oh!) …I leave these: a box of mint-condition 1918 liberty-head silver dollars. You see, back in those days, rich men would ride around in Zeppelins, dropping coins on people, and one day I seen J.D. Rockefeller flying by. So I run of the house with a big washtub and… hey! Where are you going? (in the car) Anyway, about my washtub. I’d just used it that morning to wash my turkey, which in those days was known as… (cut to mall) …a walking-bird. We’d always have walking-bird on Thanksgiving, with all the trimmings: cranberries, injun eyes, yams stuffed with gunpowder. Then we’d all watch football, which in those days was called baseball…

Another great Nancy comic strip, Mr Bushmiller really knew how to create a fun comic strip on a consistant basis.

oh good Aunt Fritzi looking much better

I too appreciate the detail of this strip. Check out the way the gams on that doll are perfectly rendered, the flow of material around her prodigious bosom, and the sublime whiteness of her elongated neck. No web comic that. Not by a million years.

Unlike the OJ incarnation, the art is sharp and has depth. Fritzi looks like a woman, unlike the androgynous character in OJ’s.

ONE cracker would spoil her dinner? I doubt that, Fritzi.

Sneaky, but effectively so.

I remember a Nancy comic when she was looking at a two layer Devils Food Cake and asked Fritzi if she can have a slice and Fritzi said “Just one slice.” The final scene shows Nancy taking the top layer with all of the icing.

They really knew how to rule panel borders in those days. Did ‘em with a pen and ink, and nothing but a ruler or T-square and a couple of triangles, like a 45° and a 60°-30°. Sometimes you just use the T-square and eyeball it out! The craft of writing was better then, too, with the subtle variations between “-” and “--” to denote differing degrees of non-punctuatedness. The letters were always rendered by hand: none of this modern “Leroy Lettering Guide” nonsense! And the tails of the balloons always pointed straight to the speaker, too. Most importantly, lots of shading was used, so you could be sure that the artist wasn’t gadding about somewhere instead of carefully filling every portion of the panel with some kind of ink. Better than a time clock! Never a question, either, of who was drawing. No, sir! The strip was signed, come rain or shine, nearly every day, and that included a legible date you could confidently put on checks and memoranda for the entire rest of the day! Also, we didn’t have “paragraphs” back then. Those were for the swells. We were happy to just jam everything that entered our heads into one long brick of text, sometimes extending over multiple pages, and ending with those three or four hyphens. Yes, we were poor, but we were happy, and we used to sprawl out and stare at those newspapers for hours at a time, wishing we had a radio or something, and fighting over the available floor space because our home, like any other normal home, was so packed with furniture and end tables that we usually had to turn sideways just to get from one side of the room to the other, so we’d end up on the heat register, where real, honest heat would rise up from the furnace in the basement, filled with real, honest anthracite coal (we’d go cold before we’d stoop to bituminous – - – - lucky for us Dad would bring home extra lumps in the pockets of his coveralls!) We didn’t know then that it made a difference to use window coverings, so we just went without, and

nice

Nancy confirmed Chaotic Neutral, DNDers go home