Denis Kitchen’s introduction to Nancy and Sluggo’s Guide to Life is certainly not the usual twee and 100% gracious foreword that collections like this often begin with. Nor should it be. It seems staggering that such a consistently inventive and clever newspaper strip as Nancy could ever have been dismissed and fallen out of favour in the way that it was at one point. Nancy first appeared in Ernie Bushmiller’s Fritzi Ritz strip in 1922, the niece of the title character, before spinning off into her own feature which Bushmiller helmed from 1938-1962. Deservedly, Bushmiller’s seminal comics have gone on to major re-evaluation and Kitchen, of course, published a number of Nancy collections through Kitchen Sink. Those books provide the foundation for this compilation from New York Review Comics which also contains some never before reprinted material.
Nancy and Sluggo’s Guide to Life is split into three themed sections on Money, Food and Sleep. The set-up is a simple one – slice-of-life humour centring on Nancy, who lives with her Aunt Fritzi, and her sometimes boyfriend-of-sorts Sluggo. In Nancy, Bushmiller gave us a schoolgirl old before her years, often finding the bizarrest solutions to anything life throws at her through a use of unlikely circuitous logic, and who constantly amuses us with observations on her environment that could only come via a child’s eye perspective of the world.
Nancy’s eccentric problem-solving skills manifest themselves in actions like preparing a separate, smaller picnic layout so the ants in the local park will leave her and Sluggo alone. Or by using a hole in a fence to ration sharing candy with a friend. Or, in a wonderful example of that aforementioned juvenile logic, saving the expensive postage charges to send a heavy book to a friend by mail by running up a huge bill reading it to her over the phone. In terms of the pure language of comics side of things the Sleep section is by far the most rewarding, with dreams frequently commandeering thought balloons (a familiar Bushmiller tool) as extra panels, and lettering tricks being used to further the humour.
For those who have discovered Nancy in recent years through Olivia Jaimes’s brilliant metafictional take this is a must-read curation of comics that underlines how the recent re-imagining of Nancy is an undeniable extrapolation of Bushmiller’s original vision. The build-up, the pacing, the twists, and the sometimes resignedly pragmatic world of Nancy and company all survives in the transition from classic to modern eras. More Nancy and Sluggo and soon please New York Review Comics.
Ernie Bushmiller (W/A) New York Review Comics, $24,95
Review by Andy Oliver
