One would think the comic strips "Nancy" and "Zippy the Pinhead" are at opposing ends of the comics spectrum.

Ernie Bushmiller's "Nancy" is an old-time, 1930s-era comic strip, constrained and consistent to the point of obsession, and beholden to the traditional "gag" payoff, whether situational, verbal, or visual. — Read the rest

UPDATE: I was had! This piece by writer AS Hamrah and illustrator R. Sikoryak was a brilliant hoax that first appeared in 1999 in the excellent Hermenaut magazine. Forgive me while I continue to believe that it's all true.

Unlikely pen pals: Nobel Prize-winning novelist/playwright/poet Samuel Beckett and artist Ernie Bushmiller, creator of one of my favorite comics of all time, Nancy. — Read the rest

If you're passing through Columbus, Ohio this summer and you've ever wondered how someone might go about making the perfect gag in a comic, you might just find something just near the solution at the Nancy Show at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. — Read the rest

Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead) won the National Cartoonists Society's highest honor, the Reuben Award in Jersey City, NJ, Thursday night. Even though it's officially for the "Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year," it's really kind of a general achievement award. — Read the rest

Here's 28 of our favorites from the last year – not all of them published in the last year, mind you – from fairy-tales to furious politics and everything in between, including the furious fairy-tale politics getting between everything. The links here include Amazon Affiliate codes; this helps us make ends meet at Boing Boing, the world's greatest neurozine. — Read the rest

One of the great moments of my adulthood was my discovery -- courtesy of Mark's posts here on Boing Boing -- of the incredible work that Ernie Bushmiller did on Nancy from 1933 until his death in 1982. He was succeeded by a series of station-keeping cartoonists, some of whom were very adept at aping his unique comic timing, sense of the absurd, and confident draftmanship, but none of whom every made me have that aha moment -- until 2018, when the mysterious, pseudonymous Olivia Jaimes took over, kicking off a run of astoundingly great new Nancys that have been collected into one of the greatest new comic-strip collections I've read in a decade.

I haven't read newspaper comics in years, and I was surprised that Nancy is still around. Yesterday's strip was about computational propaganda. I like the image of Sluggo as a bot and would like it in a T-shirt. The 123 comments on this particular strip are lively. — Read the rest

The next afternoon the phone rang.

"Hello?" came the unmistakable voice. "This is Jerry Lewis and I would be honored to write a foreword for your book."

Only hours before; with zero expectations, we had dropped our (then-slender) draft into a Fed-Ex envelope with a brief query. — Read the rest

Nancy is a harsh taskmaster; resuscitating it was a grueling task, but the challenge was invigorating and edifying. By drawing Nancy, I realized that every character (even the environment) in a strip is the cartoonist and is invested and imbued with the cartoonist’s life force.

A few years ago my then 8-year-old daughter, Jane, started reading collections of old Nancy comic strips. I'd never paid attention to the strip and assumed it wouldn't appeal to anyone over ten. But then I found Jane and her dad laughing out loud while reading Nancy in bed. — Read the rest

JULY — Listen, I know it's hard to resist the lure of Powell's on a trip to Portland (believe me, I was there twice in a three-day period), but if don't visit Floating World Comics when you're in the Rose City, it's time to sit down and take a serious look at your life. — Read the rest

My friend Craig Yoe has put together a new book with a bunch of vintage comic book stories about comic book artists!

What's cooler than comics about cartoonist? NOTHING! This is mind-blowing, full-color hardback book collects rare comics about real and fictional cartoonists – created by the greatest cartoonists in the world!

I realized that I promised you some stocking stockers for December, but then it occurred to me: why not just approach the whole thing Tom Sawyer-style, and get a few tastemakers from around the industry to help paint this year end fence by picking their top five books for 2012. — Read the rest

Tubby comic from Tubby Volume One, published by Dark Horse Comics. Read a full-length Tubby story here (PDF).

Sometime in the early 1980s I read an interview with Robert Crumb where he said that John Stanley's comic books, especially Little Lulu, were some of the finest and most influential comics he read as a child. — Read the rest

Golden Age Comic Book Stories posted a nice gallery of comix-related pinbacks from the 1930s-1990s. And there are hundreds more to see at Mark Lansdown's Comic Pinback Website, focused on specimens from the 1890s to the 1950s. (via SheWalksSoftly, thanks Stacey Ransom!)

Nancy creator Ernie Bushmiller sure looks happy!

Heidi MacDonald says:

I have a post you may enjoy, from the ever wonderful Life Mag/Google
Archives. It's from 1950 and it shows the artists of Nancy, Smokey
Stover and so on drawing on scantily clad young models.

As I've said before, we are big Little Lulu fans around my house. I read the comic anthologies to my kids all the time. Even though the stories are 50 years old, they're fun and fresh and the characters — Lulu, Tubby, and Alvin — behave like real kids. — Read the rest

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Ernie Bushmiller, creator of the beloved Nancy comic strip, was a tough act to follow. The artists who took over the strip after Bushmiller died in 1982 couldn't come close to capturing the sweetly painful simplicity and self-contained absurdism that Bushmiller faithfully injected into every Nancy strip. — Read the rest

At left, Horror comix artist William Ekgren's psychedelicreepy cover for the April, 1953 issue of Weird Horrors. Ekgren's career is profiled in the third volume of Craig Yoe's terrific Arf Forum comic/art anthology published by our pals at Fantagraphics. This insanely eclectic collection also features George "Krazy Kat" Herriman, Stan Lee, Nancy's Ernie Bushmiller, surrealist Max Ernst, and many other great artists. — Read the rest

I like the looks of this vintage kit for making a cloth doll of Nancy. It's up for auction on eBay with a current bid of US$6.99. Of course, the Sluggo kit is da one dat I really dig. From the auction listing:

1983 UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE KIT TO CREATE AN 18-INC CLOTH DOLL OF SLUGGO'S FRIEND NANCY FROM THE COMIC STRIP BY BUSHMILLER.