{"id":3392,"date":"2010-06-13T19:44:17","date_gmt":"2010-06-13T23:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=3392"},"modified":"2010-06-13T19:44:17","modified_gmt":"2010-06-13T23:44:17","slug":"bushmillers-nancy-and-iconic-solidarity-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=3392","title":{"rendered":"Bushmiller’s Nancy and Iconic Solidarity"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Nancy and her doppelganger-cousin<\/p><\/div>\n

One tired jab against Ernie Bushmiller was that he didn\u2019t draw his characters but merely rubber-stamped them on the page. Bushmiller was aware enough of this complaint to draw at least on one occasion a strip where Nancy and Sluggo do in fact emerge from the push and pull of a rubber stamp, a sort of comic strip version of the myths whereby the Gods of old emerged out of nothing. It is true that in the prime years of Nancy<\/em>, say from 1945 to 1970, Bushmiller\u2019s characters possessed a startling degree of iconic solidarity: any simple drawing of Nancy or Sluggo in profile looks remarkably like another such drawing, right down to the uniform bristle that surround Nancy\u2019s hair. But Bushmiller wasn\u2019t content to have his characters look recognizably similar from panel to panel and strip to strip which is after all what almost all cartoonists do. Bushmiller also had a propensity to proliferate images of Nancy and Sluggo within each panel, as if to show off his virtuoso skills at replication. Examples would include stories where Nancy and Sluggo have almost identical looking doppelgangers (such as the 1947 story with Nancy\u2019s cousin Judy, which manages to be both stupidly funny in the Bushmiller manner and also a little bit creepy). \u00a0Also panels where the characters see themselves in mirrors or dreams. Or the general tendency of all of Bushmiller\u2019s secondary characters to look like Platonic-types of characters rather than individual characters.<\/p>\n

Comics theorist Thierry Groensteen, in his formidable and daunting book The System of Comics<\/a>, has made \u201ciconic solidarity\u201d a key feature of the language of comics (within of course a much more complex system). But if \u201ciconic solidarity\u201d is a formalist property common to comics in general, what Bushmiller is up to is heightening this formal property by making it as blunt and visible as possible. In effect, Bushmiller\u2019s gambit is to make us aware as possible that we\u2019re reading a comic by taking a key formal property and making it part of the narrative itself. Hence all those twins and mirror images. This might explain why so many comics aficionados\u00a0have a special regard for Nancy, which often seems to be the very beating heart, the very distilled essence, of comics itself (for those who still believe, of course, in essences). And wasn\u2019t that part of the point of Mark Newgarden\u2019s “Love\u2019s Savage Fury”, to show how Nancy could retain her iconic solidarity even if distorted in countless different ways?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One tired jab against Ernie Bushmiller was that he didn\u2019t draw his characters but merely rubber-stamped them on the page. Bushmiller was aware enough of this complaint to draw at least on one occasion a strip where Nancy and Sluggo do in fact emerge from the push and pull of a rubber stamp, a sort of comic strip version of the myths whereby the Gods of old emerged out of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[413,850,939,1289,1290],"class_list":["post-3392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-bushmiller","tag-newgarden","tag-nancy","tag-the-system-of-comics","tag-thierry-groensteen"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}