Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Editing his balloons

One more bit about Ernie Bushmiller’s care with words:

According to his associate James Carlsson, Bushmiller would line up each week’s worth of unfinished Nancy strips on his studio wall and scrutinize every line of dialogue. Harry Haenigsen noted that “Ernie said when he wrote his captions, he wrote them as if he were writing telegrams,” which are charged by the word. “He eliminated anything — any word that, to him, was not necessary to express his ideas. He was very careful about how he edited his balloons.”

Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden, How to Read “Nancy”: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2017).
Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
Bushmiller, Strunk, and Wilde

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