I was quickly disabused of this notion once I began to have lengthy talks with Ernie’s former “right-hand man” and neighbor, Jim Carlsson, still alive and well and living just a few hours from me, in Connecticut. I figured he was probably unaware of, or uninterested in, the larger world of art and comics. What, if any, misconceptions did you have about Bushmiller before writing this book? What were you surprised to learn?īefore I started to research “Three Rocks,” I will confess to assuming that Ernie Bushmiller was a man of average intelligence, with a conventional level of sophistication. They ask that you pause and take in their perfect hemispheres-their “three rocks”-ness. In one of Nancy’s earliest appearances, from 1933, she sits on her lawn atop three rocks.
So “Nancy” was imprinted on me at this time, and that feeling stayed with me, even as I got older and began to develop more adult tastes in comics, like “Pogo” or “Plastic Man.” It’s only later that I realized the zen quality of the strip. The letters were nice and big, with plenty of inviting airspace inside the word balloons, with a minimum of punctuation to decipher. Since I was just learning to read, “Nancy” seemed user-friendly. I remember feeling drawn not to the art or the humor of the strips but to its lettering. My first exposure to Nancy was in the funny pages of the Sunday newspaper delivered to my house in Brooklyn in the late nineteen-forties. When did you first encounter Nancy? Were you always a fan? We spoke to Griffith about what led him to want to inhabit another cartoonist’s style and skin. “Nancy,” the strip, sometimes reads like a puzzle, not unlike her creator: a conservative-leaning workaholic an absurdist who strove, daily, with meditative devotion, to get the gag down in the fewest strokes possible. But Griffith does more than evoke an era he asks questions about Bushmiller’s artistic motivations, pondering Bushmiller’s love of surrealism and his habit of sneaking inexplicable moments into Nancy’s otherwise pedestrian world. There’s a bygone glamour to Griffith’s rendition of Bushmiller’s New York, replete with crowded cartoonists’ dens, couriers dashing off to get the daily strip to press, and long, smoke-filled lunches with fellow-cartoonists, including Bushmiller’s close friend Milt Gross. (Would Nancy be Nancy without Sluggo, her best friend and co-conspirator?) Griffith draws Bushmiller’s life in the language of “Nancy”: in clean lines, equal-size panels, and short bursts of dialogue, painting a portrait of a superstar cartoonist during an era of syndicated comics and widespread readership when virtually everyone, young and old, read the paper. Griffith follows Bushmiller, a Bronx native born to immigrants in 1905, through his transformation from a teen-age copy boy to a successful cartoonist whose beloved characters engendered their own world. And four rocks was unacceptable because four rocks would indicate ‘some rocks’ but it would be one rock more than was necessary to convey the idea of ‘some rocks.’ ” Why? Because two rocks wouldn’t be ‘some rocks.’ Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. As Scott McCloud related in “ Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art,” “Art Spiegelman explains how a drawing of three rocks in a background scene was Ernie’s way of showing us there were some rocks in the background. As the fellow-cartoonist Wally Wood apparently once quipped, it’s harder to not read “Nancy” than to read it.įor modern-day cartoonists, Bushmiller’s “Nancy” has long represented the essence of the distillation inherent in comics. Round-faced, with dots for eyes and a baby-doll silhouette, Nancy captured the public’s attention thanks to her bright ideas, unwavering aplomb, and penchant for finding trouble even in the most ordinary of circumstances. In 1933, he introduced an eight-year-old kid, Nancy, to his widely popular strip “Fritzi Ritz,” about a bombshell flapper living in New York City. The subject of Griffith’s forthcoming biography is spelled out in the title: “ Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy.” Bushmiller was the creator of one of America’s most ubiquitous cartoon characters. Enter Bill Griffith, who, as the creator of a character called Zippy the Pinhead, is one of the very few contemporary cartoonists who has managed to keep a daily strip going for decades, starting in 1970. There are movies about filmmaking, and novels about professors of literature, but there aren’t many comic-book biographies of cartoonists.
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