Nancy Classics by Ernie Bushmiller for December 10, 2021

In January of 1929, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali unleashed their notorious (infamous?) seventeen minute surrealist film Un Chien Andalou… shocking French bourgeois sensibilities, not least because of the opening shot of the eye of a living human being being sliced with a straight razor.

Exactly twenty years later, the January/February 1949 issue of Psyché featured an influential essay interpreting the film in psychoanalytic terms. The notoriety and controversy were still operating at full force and were by now covered in the American popular press, scandalizing American readers.

One month later, in March of 1949, this comic strip appeared. Bushmiller, though interested in and knowledgable about surrealist art, couldn’t explicitly depict an eye-slashing in American newspapers, especially in a kid-friendly comic.

So, this muted (not mutilated) homage was his comment….