num_pages: 432
description: A funny thing happened on the way to comic-strip immortality. For many years Ernie Bushmiller 's Nancy with its odd-looking squat heroine nearly abstract art and often super-corny gags was perceived as the stodgiest squarest comic strip in the world. Popular with newspaper readers true but definitely not a strip embraced by comic-strip connoisseurs like Krazy Kat Dick Tracy or Terry and the Pirates. But then those connoisseurs took a closer look and began to realize that Bushmiller 's art approached its own kind of cartoon perfection and those corny gags often achieved a striking zen quality. In its own way it turned out Nancy was in fact the most iconic comic strip of all. (The American Heritage Dictionary actually uses a Nancy strip to illustrate its entry on comic strip. ) Charter members of the Nancy revival include Art Spiegelman who published Mark Newgarden 's famous Love 's Savage Fury (featuring Nancy and Bazooka Joe) in an early issue of RAW; Fletcher Hanks anthologist Paul Karasik; Zippy the Pinhead creator Bill Griffith; underground publisher Denis Kitchen who released several volumes of Nancy collections in the 1980s; Understanding Comics Scott McCloud who created the Five-Card Nancy card game; Joe Brainard who produced an entire Nancy book of paintings in 2008; and Andy Warhol who produced a painting based on Nancy. Beginning in the Winter of 2011 fans will be dancing with joy as Fantagraphics unveils an ongoing Nancy reprint project. Each volume contain a whopping full four years of daily Nancy strips (a Sunday Nancy project looms in the future) collected in a fat square (what else for the squarest strip in the world?) package designed by Jacob (Popeye Beasts  Willie and Joe) Covey. This first volume will collect every daily strip from 1943 to 1946. (Fantagraphics will eventually release Nancy 's first five years 1938-1942 but given the scarcity of archival material for these years we are giving ourselves some extra time to collate it all.) This first Nancy volume will feature an introduction by another stellar Bushmiller fan Daniel Clowes (from whose collection most of the strips in this volume were scanned) a biography of the artist and much more.
language: English
title: Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies, 1943–1945
publisher: Fantagraphics Books