Nancy Classics by Ernie Bushmiller for December 10, 2021

Here’s looking at you.

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….

So in the second panel, Nancy has a sort of a Popeye the Sailor Man look?

Coincidences always happen to dat Nancy!

No wonder Frodo and Sam found Mordor to be dusty. Stupid Eye of Sauron!

Ah yes, I remember when cans full of ashes, labeled “Ashes,” could be found on every street corner.

oh the ’i’rony….see what i did there?

Why the heck is there an ash can on the street corner?

Now that is quite an instance.

“He’s saying ‘ash can.’”

“Ash can what?”