Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy

One master of comics arts pays tribute to another in this inventive graphic biography of Ernie Bushmiller (1905–1982), creator of the long-running strip Nancy. Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead) and his Zen surrealist nonchalance might seem an odd fit for the ostensibly square Bushmiller. He certainly plays with form, inserting himself into the narrative and rearranging Bushmiller’s artwork—but he’s earnest about Nancy: “the perfect expression of what comics are.” The Bronx-born Bushmiller, as a funnies-obsessed 19-year-old high school dropout copy boy at the New York World, got a lucky break in 1925 when he was offered the gig to take over a cheesecake strip about a flapper named Fritzi. After he gave Fritzi a trouble-prone niece named Nancy in 1933, he found “the little dickens was soon stealing the show.” As Bushmiller advances from success to success with the retitled strip, Griffith resists seeking darkness beneath the contented exterior of an artist who married happily, read voraciously, and lived the suburban life in Connecticut. Contemporaries including actor Harold Lloyd, Krazy Kat’s George Herriman, and Flash Gordon’s Alex Raymond make cameos. Griffith points to the strip’s meta narratives and concise absurdist non-punch-lines (Nancy blows a gum bubble so large a confused Martian sees it) as proof that this little dickens meant more than the space she filled in back pages. It’s a surprisingly satisfying homage to an undersung artist. (Aug.)