Bill Griffith in Bushmillerland

Bill Griffith. Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created “Nancy.” New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2023. 265 pages. $24.95.

Bill Griffith is a longtime visitor to what he calls Bushmillerland. He learned to read, he says, by looking at Nancy. His own work is characterized by crosshatching and density — there might be more lines in one Zippy panel than in an entire Ernie Bushmiller strip — but Griffith’s admiration for Bushmiller’s “pristine simplicity of composition” is absolute. And that simplicity was the result of extraordinary care: in his later years, Bushmiller let his assistants know that Nancy’s hair was to have 69 to 107 spikes, no more, no less.

For Griffith, Nancy is the irreducible essence of comics. As he writes, “Nancy doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be a child. Nancy tells you what it’s like to be a comic strip.” As if to prove the point, we learn late in this graphic biography that Bushmiller kept a copy of the American Heritage Dictionary next to his favorite chair, the volume opened to page 266, where a 1957 Nancy served to illustrate comic strip.

Ernest Bushmiller (1905–1982), a child of the Bronx, left school at fourteen and became a copy boy at the New York World. Work on crossword grids and comic strips followed, and in 1925 he took over Fritzi Ritz, a cheesecake strip. Nancy, Fritzi’s niece, came onboard in 1933, and in 1938 the strip was renamed Nancy. (Fritzi stayed on, ever glamorous, something Griffith ponders in a meditation on “The Persistence of Cheesecake in Nancy.”) Though Bushmiller thought of himself as producing entertainment for the “gum chewers,” he found himself in esteemed company: James Cagney, George Herriman, Rea Irvin, Harold Lloyd, Groucho Marx, and Eleanor Roosevelt are among those whose paths crossed his. By the mid-1970s Nancy appeared in more than 800 daily newspapers. When Parkinson’s began to limit Bushmiller’s ability to draw, assistants took on ever greater responsibilities with the strip.

The Bushmiller who takes form in this biography is more than slightly driven: living a frugal life in Connecticut with his wife Abby, working his way through vacations, browsing the Sears Roebuck catalogue for comic possibilities, forever looking for the next “snapper,” the gag idea from which he would work backwards to create a strip. Drawing on the recollections of Bushmiller’s friend and assistant Jim Carlsson, Griffith has many surprising details to share: Bushmiller admired Velázquez, Fats Waller, and Thomas Wolfe; he corresponded with a young Charles Schulz; he worked at four drawing boards, switching from strip to strip; he kept a bathroom plunger close at hand for inspiration (“It’s golden,” he said). Griffith now and then depicts himself as a tour guide in an imaginary Bushmiller Museum of Comic Art, making a case for Nancy as stuff for grown-ups, and suggesting largely convincing parallels to the work of Hopper, Magritte, and Warhol.

This biography is, of course, full of art, with full-page illustrations and many smaller panels depicting places and events in Bushmiller’s life. Dozens of original Nancy strips serve as exhibits. Many other Nancy strips and single panels are repurposed to tell parts of the story, with Griffith keeping characters as Bushmiller drew them and adding new dialogue and backgrounds. The repurposing of Nancy images reaches an emotional and imaginative peak in the book’s final pages, with “Professor Griffith” visiting a United Feature Retirement Facility to meet the aging Nancy, Sluggo, Dagmar, Plato, and Spike. But you’ll have to read to find out what happens.

[A representative composite panel: Nancy and rocks by Bushmiller, mise en scène by Griffith.]

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