Paul KarasikHow to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels

Doing a lot of something — anything, really — creates a familiarity that the casual observer cannot imagine. All the elements you’re working with become apparent, and we even name them. I’m talking about objects that, when viewed sequentially take on a form, and about the relationships between those objects, their creator and their audience. I could be speaking of just comic art, but it’s true of all art, illustration, music, poetry, literature, architecture, city planning, house building... you name it; everything fits into larger structures and contains smaller structures. So whenever we view the comics and spend 10 seconds per strip, we never grasp the elements that went into their composition into a complete work.Since we have no concept of the elements of someone else’s arts and skills, we have even less ability to imagine how a craftsman puts them together, what he relates them to, or how he makes it relevant to the world around him. This book tells us something about all those little secret parts of a mysterious art form. They’re not unknown to other craftsmen: a musician, for instance knows the forms of songs, sonatas, rondos, binary, fugues... and the elements of music will keep you studying their relationships over your entire lifetime; nobody can know it all. A house builder knows not just the names of all the parts of a house and all their relationships with each other, but also the sequence in which they must go together, and what must be present and removed at various stages of its development. Lack of understanding of those rules will lead you to a pile of premature rubble.The comic artist isn’t worried about his comics harming his readers (er... with some possible exceptions), but he knows how to assemble the elements in many ways, each of which produces a certain desired effect for the observer. Some are subtle, even subliminally subtle. Others are banal, maybe slapstick, but a great comic artist uses little strokes of genius to bring the viewer to a certain place reliably at the end of the last frame of the comic. Once in a lightning strike an artist will feel his gag developing into that perfect storm of elements, which he brings to a masterful climax that causes readers to slap their leg, cut out the strip, copy it for their friends, and go buy the book.“How to Read Nancy” can’t tell you how to produce that perfect storm that endears your reader for life, but it can at least put you in the game by explaining those elements, and giving you comprehensively many clean and clear examples so that you can’t help but come away with a grasp of the elements of comic arts. Not saying ALL the elements are there; elements come and go, and each artist is going to have sets of elements that overlap but do not duplicate other artists’ sets. But if you read this book you will be able to identify ALL the elements of your own work, and you’ll have some vicarious experience with how Ernie Bushmiller put together his work. When you see the progression of his lines — his lines of thought, of action, of distraction, intuition, plot, line-width etc. — you will see how he consistently and predictably was able to move the reader in some direction. Young readers often “grow out of” Nancy for a while. When you develop a taste for the more sophisticated comics, it’s easy to reject Nancy as too infantile, but if you read a lot of Nancy strips, you become aware that Bushmiller was knocking your funny bone — gently — in every single one of them. His motto was “simplify,” so he pared his strips down to exactly those essentials necessary to bring back those eyes tomorrow and the next day. Once in a while they could be gutbustingly funny, but he always made his mark. It was a low bar to clear, and Nancy only gave you a small rise, but Bushmiller did it so consistently. He never failed. I may never have sent a Nancy comic to my friends, but I always read it, so I’d say Bushmiller succeeded.The book will show you how to find and use the tricks. I know of no other book that even attempts to do this in the comics, and frankly books of this clarity with strong theory realized by expert technique are rare in ANY craft, not just a home run but a grand slam. This is the stuff that experts tend to keep to themselves, not feeling comfortable trying to put something into words that can be so easily misunderstood or flat-out wrong. How to Read Nancy gets it right.

Let’s a get few things out of the way first. This is easily one of the most brilliant books about comics, a comics character, that character’s history – and the aesthetics of comics on the whole – ever written. And that’s saying something because there are many good books about those subjects – including the central subject herself.When I was a kid, the Nancy comic strip was always good for quick laugh – and nothing more was thought of it. By the late 60s, early 70s Nancy was considered (among the Marvel zombies, my underground comix reading pals and other aspiring cartoonists I was hanging out with) the squarest of the square. As the author’s note, even execs at its syndicator called it “The comic strip everyone loved to hate”. There were rumors that Bushmiller didn’t even draw it anymore – that he had 60 rubber stamps of Nancy and Sluggo in various poses which were used to quickly produce the daily panels. It was an early 1980s evening spent in the company of alternative cartoonist Jerry Moriatry (“Jack Survives”) that changed my mind – as he began to explain to me his POV on Bushmiller and Nancy, raising my consciousness and forcing me to reevaluate the strip.I soon realized I wasn’t alone. Appreciating Nancy, studying its gags and structure, was what any serious student of comic art did. Eventually well-curated reprint books of Ernie Bushmiller’s greatest strips began appearing from publishers of the likes of Kitchen Sink and Fantagraphics. The first of these, Brian Walker’s The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy (Henry Holt, 1988), contained Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik’s original essay on “How To Read Nancy” – and that article has been expanded upon to create this masterpiece of a book.On the one hand, this is an analysis of a single strip, broken down into 44 steps that dissect why Nancy works as pure comics. On the other hand, the book is the history of Ernie Bushmiller, his art, his comic strips and his philosophy (“The gag is the thing”). On the third hand, it’s a collection of some of best of Nancy (over 160 strips are reprinted throughout and especially in its last 40 pages). The book is bursting with rare illustrations and lost photographs – and like Bushmiller’s work itself, each image has a purpose; to illustrate a point, to educate or to tell the story of Bushmiller’s incredible career.Appendices that further breakdown the gags, feature Nancy memorabilia and celebrate Bushmiller ephemera abound. Ahh, what a treasure trove of material. This is the real deal – not light reading, but a college course on one man, one gag and of the comic strip medium itself. Did I mention it has a Foreword by the late comic genius Jerry Lewis and an introduction by art historian James Elkins? What are you waiting for – A garden hose? Order this book now!

In the 70s, as a late boomer, between Peanuts and Doonesbury, I considered Nancy lame & corny. It didn't feel timeless, it felt anachronistic and out of touch. It was my depression-era-baby parents' generation that I guess were its core fans that kept it popular. There was a quote by Bushmiller in How To Read Nancy where he says Nancy is Lawrence Welk. Exactly. And only boomers, their parents & grandparents will understand that. My millennial son loves Nancy but he looks at it like a new discovery that's meant to be unironically earnestly self-unaware.So with all renewed popularity around Nancy, new and classic, I bought this book thinking it had to be satire. What I found was a thoughtful objective book on the little-known Ernie Brushmiller and his strip. The meat of the book is its second title, The Elements Of Comics In Three Easy Panels, a 46 chaptered lecture using deceptively simple Nancy to deconstruct successful visual communication in the sequential art of comics.There is also more information than you'll ever need on the history of the watering hose gag.I highly recommend for anyone interested in the history of comics in general and for artists who want to apply the principles of sequential storytelling. It must be also be the most definitive history of Nancy.I still roll my eyes at the gags and still think they can be lame, though.

It's essentially a static PDF type of book. The print is so small that even on my 21" computer monitor I have had, for the first time, to discover the "windows magnifier" function, which makes the text possible to read. I imagine the physical book is a tall, oversized affair. It just doesn't work as a Kindle text—it would have had to be recreated specifically for this medium. I'm still going to read it, but it's irritating that it doesn't function well. If you have Comixology on and iPad, you can easily expand the size with your fingers and scroll around, and the text is clear (which it isn't with Windows magnifier, it's fuzzy), but not being able to read on a Kindle device or a PC app is frustrating as all get out!

The kindle version of this book is a sham. While the introductory chapters with Bushmillers life story are at least somewhat adequately sized, if you are willing to incur a bit of eyestrain, when it gets to the actual meat of the book, the part where you are supposed to actually read Nancy, you cannot.Zooming is also disabled, with the exception of the paragraph zoom the Kindle App offers, which allows you to magnify a single paragraph. Sadly, if you chose to read it like this, you will have to find the point at which you left off after every stop of your mousewheel. It is highly unnerving.Since this book is not an e-book that sports re-flowing text but set set width image blocks, the reading experience is grating at best.The content of the book is excellent if you plan to draw 3-panel cartoons. But unless the above mentioned problems get fixed, get the hardcopy. E-reading is straining enough at proper sizes, do not put yourself through this ordeal.

This is a fascinating book which analyses the elements which make up a cartoon. The authors are quick to point out the invisible art of each Nancy strip. And Nancy is so precise and measured that it bears such analysis. Ernie Bushmiller has placed each element in his strips (characters, props, word balloons - even his signature) very carefully to maximize the gags payoff at the end. This is a beautiful tribute to Nancy and to all artistic endeavors which are well crafted, highly skilled and economic. Bushmiller's restraint is gorgeous. Thank you for your wonderful book! Highly recommended! Reading Nancy is like pondering a Zen Koan.

This book is unprecedented. The sheer precision of observation into how we read comics, the detailed semiotics embedded into simple lines, and the way our eyes and brains process visual icons, is fantastic. The authors spend hundreds of pages discussing one three-panel Nancy comic, and it stays informative all the way through.