Las Meninas y Nancy y Sluggo

[Alpha tool by me. Click for a larger view.]

Fresca said she’d like to see Nancy and friends as painted by Velázquez. I can sort of oblige. I hope they didn’t get ice cream on the canvas.

I thought Joe Brainard took care of this premise in one of his many Nancy homage/spoofs, but no, that was his Goya Nancy. And Goya Nancy still looks like Nancy, just as Brainard’s de Kooning Nancy still looks like Nancy. Nancy is indelible.

*

I just remembered this one: Nancy and Gustave Doré.

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[This post is the kind of thing I do while waiting for news of the next indictment. I borrowed Nancy and Sluggo from their postage stamp.]

Velázquez and Tootsie Rolls

Hogan’s Alley, “the magazine of the cartoon arts,” has an interview with Bill Griffith, whose Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, will be published on August 29. Two details: Bushmiller’s favorite artist was Diego Velázquez. And about money:

He invested in the stock market with his considerable wealth. But the only stock he really followed was the Tootsie Roll Company. I checked. It’s still a privately held company. Funny and a little weird — but fitting. Sluggo would approve.

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Nancy, writing by hand

From today’s yesterday’s Nancy:

[Nancy, July 20, 1950. Click for a larger view.]

Nancy, like Sluggo, has beautiful handwriting. And she’s using a dip pen.

But it’s a runaway gorilla, not Sluggo, at her window.

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An EXchange name sighting

[From One Way Street (dir. Hugo Fregonese, 1950). Click for a larger view.]

He: “Where are we?”

She: “Harbor Drive and Gordon.”

Harbor Drive and Gordon is an intersection existing only in movie dialogue. Harbor Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue are real, but miles and miles apart. TUcker was indeed a Los Angeles exchange.

If you look closely, you can notice the cutting and pasting that went into making this directory “page.”

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A CMOS quiz

From The Chicago Manual of Style, a new quiz: Other Languages.

[I scored a 90. Someday I’m gonna get 100.]

The pencil business

[From Outside the Wall (dir. Crane Wilbur, 1950).]

“A bright future in the pencil” — in the pencil what ? Business, I suppose.

It’s possible that “the pencil business” is a jokey way of referring to accounting, but I can find no evidence for that. I think that here the pencil business is, indeed, the pencil business. Outside the Wall might have been a different (and duller) movie had ex-convict Larry Nelson (Richard Basehart) studied accounting.

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Better living through TV

A criminal, in Hi-Jacked (dir. Sam Newfield, 1950):

“How’d we ever get along without television?”

[He just got the idea for his next crime from a television feature about a showroom full of furs. Post title from The Honeymooners.]

The mind-body problem

[After turning on the car’s AC.]

“Is it blowing on us and our feet?”

👍 ?

The Unbearable Ambiguity of Emoji: Does 👍 mean “I accept the contract that you just texted me,” or “I’m acknowledging receipt of the contract”?

🤔.

Knees, outer, inner

Steven Millhauser, “The Pleasures and Sufferings of Young Gautama,” in Voices in the Night (2015).

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