Nancy Loves Sluggo

By Ernie Bushmiller

Introduction by Ivan Brunetti

Fantagraphics, 2014

Nancy connoisseurs know all about the three rocks. They are the icon of suburban outdoorsiness in Ernie Bushmiller’s famed mainstream comic strip about an impetuous little girl with a horizontal black line for a nose.

The three rocks have been exalted and elaborated upon by such celebrated modern cartoonists and graphic analysts as Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead), Scott (Understanding Comics) McCloud, Mark (We All Die Alone) Newgarden, Art (Maus) Spiegelman and current Nancy cartoonist Guy Gilchrist (who avers that Nancy’s hometown is Three Rocks, Tennessee).

Ivan Brunetti, who once submitted samples for consideration as a Nancy writer/artist and who created the two-volume Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories for Yale Press, doesn’t mention the three rocks in his introduction to the just-released third volume of collected Bushmiller Nancy strips, Nancy Loves Sluggo. What he does mention, regarding his brief failed attempt to take over Nancy, is “how much I loved drawing Sluggo (and especially his decrepit house).”

There are precious few three-rocks arrangements in Nancy Loves Sluggo, which includes all the daily Nancy strips from 1949 through 1951. Bushmiller would do Nancy until 1982, and the golden age of the three rocks was probably the 1970s.

What Nancy Loves Sluggo does have is a couple of strips showing the consistency with which Ernie Bushmiller rendered Sluggo’s backyard.

On Jan. 5, 1949, Nancy berates Sluggo for not washing his window. “I like it dis way,” the stubble-headed hobo child retorts.

“But you can’t see out,” Nancy insists.

“Who’d want to?,” Sluggo exclaims, throwing open the window to reveal factory smokestacks, a vista-blocking silo, a slew of discarded cans and papers, and a pig wallowing in a mud puddle.

A year later, on Jan. 25, 1950, Sluggo is elated. “Hey Nancy—one of my chicks just hatched. Wonder what he thinks he first looks around.”

Nancy: “How much better the view was inside.”

And there’s the yard again. Same silo, same cans and bottles and paper, same tired pig in the same dark puddle. There are a few changes—instead of a factory, there’s an abandoned house, and the yard is bordered by a delapidated picket fence and a wooden keg full of trash. But Sluggo’s environment is secure. Here’s a boy whose home is so wretched a pig is happy to stay there too.

Bushmiller is renowned as a gag artist. Every panel, it would seem, is created to serve the punchline of that single day’s strip. Yet, reading Nancy in order, you realize how much continuity, how much character development, how much serialization actually exists in the quick-joke Nancy universe. This latest volume contains over a week of strips when Sluggo gains weight, a separate long sequence when Nancy moons over a movie star, and another bunch of strips when a Spanish girl moves to town. There are the abstractions, obsessions and comic exaggerations we associate with classic Nancy, but there are also reasons to appreciate the strip in grand lumps and not just in bite-sized daily single-joke servings.

The Nancy books from Fantagraphics—Nancy is Happy, Nancy Loves Christmas and now Nancy Loves Sluggo—are an incredible resource for Bushmiller devotees. Kitchen Sink Press put out some cherished thematic collections of Nancy strips back (Nancy Eats Food; Bums, Beatniks and Hippies; Nancy’s Pets; Dreams and Schemes; How Sluggo Survives!) back in the ‘80s, around the same time that comics historian Brian Walker published the exceptional anthology/biography The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy. But until now there has not been a comprehensive grouping of all the daily Nancys, where you can trace the rocks, pinpoint the pigs and admire the hairbowed breadth of it all.

(Literary Up is my new umbrella title for daily reviews of books, audiobooks and comic books here at www.scribblers.us)

Rogue Male

A cultured, suspenseful, lovingly labored reading of Geoffrey Household’s classic thriller Rogue Male can be heard this week on BBC Radio 4 Extra. This 1939 tale of political activism, tireless pursuit, sudden violent transgressions—and lots of anxious downtime—is one of my favorite novels ever.

Like its game-hunter hero, you can’t kill this book with a stick. Beside this reading, Rogue Male has been a film, a TV movie, a 90-minute radio play and an episode of the show Suspense. All are recommended.

The daily broadcast is now several chapters into the book, which has been divided into 15 episodes. BBC Radio 4 keeps shows online for a week following their first broadcast, so if you start listening today you can still catch episodes 7-12.

By Episode 8, we’re well past the hunter hero’s opening assault on the unspecified yet highly Hitlerian despotic world leader. A certain small town murder has also happened. We’re now into my favorite bit, where the protagonist literally goes underground, living in a self-styled rabbit hole, barely keeping ahead of his predators.

Michael Jayston has just the right haughty tone for this adventure. Household’s hero. (The character is never named in the book, though Fritz Lang’s 1941 film version Man Hunt calls him Alan Thorndyke. The star of the 1976 BBC TV version, Peter O’Toole, is credited simply as “Hunter”). The hunter has a self-confidence and air of superiority that would be insufferable were his exploits (told in the first person) not so worth bragging about. Jayston’s delivery maintains that cultured air. He’s never breathless or wild. He’s telling you, calmly and clearly, about that rather interesting time when he was on the run for attempting to assassinate a world leader.

Jayston’s heard as a “station voice” at BBC Essex besides his book readings, also recited a radio version of Household’s Rogue Justice, the years-later sequel to Rogue Male, which first aired in 2009.

Hit List
By Laurell K. Hamilton (2011, Berkley Books)
Read one Laurell K. Hamilton novel and you might be cowed by all the rules, all the dues, the characters have to contend with. Big supernatural interspecies pecking order here. Instinctive behavior includes not only knowing who to bloodthirstily devour for maximum spiritual fulfillment (as if the victims came with nutritional printed on them like in supermarkets) but also who to revere and protect.
These are fantasy books where one of the fantasies is a balanced, orderly universe. Even the world’s horrors are balanced and orderly. Vile demons and bloodsuckers and werewolves all have counterparts in law enforcement with fine-tuned intuitions and a more-than-professional desire to take these evildoers down.
Once you’ve experienced a few Hamilton tomes, you realize how easy it is to overlook all the laws of conduct if you choose. The books are rich with detail of all kinds. They’re also told in a saucy, cynical first-person voice. You buy in avidly.
If the sci-fi explanations still bog you down, you can always delight in the equally controlled, vivid, soulful and spiritually resuscitating sex scenes.
The ardeur is Laurell K. Hamilton’s greatest invention. It’s sex as the ultimate act of discourse, civilized or otherwise. It’s physical gratification, psychological mindmelding and fuel station stop all at once.
For Hamilton’s heroine Anita Blake, certified maverick Vampire Hunter and multi-powered supernatural misfit, the sex scenes aren’t calm respites between the action scenes, as they are for James Bond. They’re the highest level of action scene.
Wherever the ardeur comes in an Anita Blake adventure, it’s the climax.
And that’s the crux of the latest book:
I hugged my knees to my chest. “I’d gotten used to the extra healing that I get with the metaphysics. I thought the super healing was because of the lycanthropy and the vampire marks. I didn’t realize it was tied this much to the ardeur.”
“And that bothers you?” he said.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I can go days without feeding the ardeur now. I was so happy and it was going to make being a U.S. Marshal so much easier, but now I know the price of not feeding. When I’m hunting bad guys I need the extra healing, so that means I still have to feed regularly. Do you know how hard that is on an active warrant of execution out of state?”