Jerry Scott's Nancy reviewed by Ron Evry

Reading a few years worth of Jerry Scott's Nancy comic strips all at once provides the perspective needed to really understand the dilemma involved in appreciating the quality of his work.
Simply put, Jerry Scott's Nancy is disturbingly terrific. Virtually no one else on the comic page these days has such a lively, animated drawing style. The characters want to jump off the page. They have a physicality that is truly remarkable; kicking and squirming, tipping boats, leaning off the edge of their beds with their tongues hanging out from indigestion, pounding nails, sloshing through mud, doing triple-gainers off skateboards, choking and pounding each other on moving sleds, bouncing down the street with hiccups, splashing in the rain, being flown in air by a kite stuck to the ground, running from room to room trying to find a pencil and paper, chasing a balloon up a tree, biting into hot dogs that want to fly out of the bun, bolting out the door for recess, demolishing snowmen, getting hit with the newspaper or blowing the world's largest bubblegum bubble. Readers lucky enough to get the full three-tier half-page strip will see Nancy and Sluggo hanging from the letters of the strip's title.
There's no doubt about it; this comic knows how to move, and it is funny to boot.
Scott is no stranger to a well-placed sound effect, either. Readers are treated to "Phoof! Phoof! Phoof!," "Poke! Poke! Poke!!" "Jab! Jab! Jab!," in one strip: "Chomp!," "Phuh!," "Achoo!," "Hic!, "Burp!" and "POW"" in another. Hardly an episode goes by that does not feature a "BAP!" or "BONK!" or "Slurrp!" or "Fling!", "Splunk!," "Zoop!," "Whump!" and the ever-present "AAAGHH!" It is precisely because Jerry Scott's Nancy is so well done that the dilemma exists. The strip did not jump out of a void in 1983 when Scott took over the strip. Today's Nancy and Sluggo are not even remotely close to Ernie Bushmiller's original characters at all. While Bushmiller's strip went through many changes over the decades, Nancy herself remained consistent through the years. As far back as the 1930s, Nancy would make occasional appearances in Bushmiller's Fritzi Ritz comic strip. From the earliest days, she was something of a pest who loved to stick her nose into things. By 1938, Nancy had replaced Phil Fumble as the "topper" strip that appeared on the Sunday Bushmiller page.
While Nancy and Sluggo would often enough engage in slapstick mischief, Bushmiller's stock-in-trade for the strip was the visual pun. He got the most milage out of Nancy taking people's statements impossibly literally. If her Aunt Fritzi told her she could only buy "one piece of candy," rest assured that Nancy would walk out of the candy shop with a candy cane three feet high. When told she had to wear a new hat that she hated, Nancy tied the entire hat box on her head with the hat inside. Another recurring theme fea- tured Nancy visualizing idioms like "raining cats and dogs," Beyond that, Nancy was always clever, in a Chaplinesque way. Messy spaghetti? Not if Nancy ties it up in a ball. It's easy to have a hotdog cookout if a construction worker's blowtorch is lying around. And there's nothing like spreading an ice cream sandwich on two slices of bread on a hot day.
During the 1940s, Bushmiller managed to balance the jokes and puns with a bit of continuity, usually by introducing a character and doing a series of gags involving him or her. Some of the characters became mainstays of the strip, such as Rollo the rich kid, nosy Irma, tough guy Butch and quite a few more. By the '50s and '60s continuity Was almost totally gone, but in its place was perhaps the sparsest, most economically drawn comic strip of all time. Bushmiller had gotten everything down to a series of extremely simple drawings that have been lauded as minimalist masterpieces by such diverse talents as Denis Kitchen and Art Spiegelman. By 1982, Bushmiller had passed away, leaving the strip in the hands of Mark Lasky, who tried his best to emulate the original. Unfortunately for him, he too died after having the strip for a very short while. When Jerry Scott was given Nancy, he inherited a comic that had declined from its heights of popularity, and United Features Syndicate gave him carte blanche to play around with it. In a 1987 interview with the Washington Post, Scott candidly stated, "I had trouble copying Bushmiller's drawing style, so I altered it. Yes, I eliminated Fritzi, Rollo, Irma and the Hobo, and they aren't coming back.
"We wanted to make Nancy a little more relevant to the '80s," he explained. In recent years, publisher Denis Kitchen has printed a series of Nancy reprint books organized around themes, and they are joyous celebration of the timelessness of Bushmiller's deceptively simple genius. Kitchen also has an assortment of very popular "Nancy" merchandise, including ties, shirts and mugs. By keeping the original strip alive in this manner, it makes it more galling than ever to see Scott's version co-existing with it.
Frankly, I would be happier if the syndicate told Scott to change the characters' names to "Pansy and Pluggo," remove any resemblance they have to the real N&S, and let him keep it going as his own original creation. Yes, I know that he is having a large degree of success with Baby Blues, a fine comic that should be discussed separately, but it doesn't have the slapstick animation of his current Nancy strip, which shouldn't be lost. Once again, there's the dilemma. During Nancy's height of the early '60's, a number of ghost artists worked on the Dell and Gold Key comic book versions of the strip. Some of them were adequate, some were awful. But one stands outーJohn Stanley, of Little Lulu fame, made Nancy his own without throwing away anything of Bushmiller's. In a remarkable blending of styles, he managed to do a series of Nancy stories that had the look and feel of Bushmiller at his most minimal. Yet, he built on that foundation and introduced Characters and situations that were totally original and hysterically funny.
Most memorable were the stories of Sluggo's frustrated neighbor, McOnion. McOnion, after being inadvertently victimized by Sluggo, would get a glazed look in his eye and calmly chase Sluggo to the ends of the earth chanting, "You're doomed, Sluggo. Doomed." Stanley only lasted a while on the comic book, and the ghosts who followed tried to imitate him. They failed miserably. Still, looking at the Stanley strips gives hope that a true inheritor to the Bushmiller mystique can be found out there somewhere and bring the real Nancy and Sluggo back.

N.B.: "Bringing the real Nancy and Sluggo back" is in fact what United Feature Syndicate is after, because at press time Hogan's Alley learned that the syndicate and cartoonist Jerry Scott have agreed to part ways. Brothers Brad and Guy Gilchrist （The Muppets） reportedly have been hired to draw Nancy. They have been charged with depicting Nancy and Sluggo in the 1990s but returning the artistic and thematic modes to those of Ernie Bushmiller.

[Maybe Jerry Scott Nancy isn't the same as Bushmiller, but I'll take it any day over Precious Moments Guy Gilchrist Nancy (blech).]