Review: Michael Robbins on “Nancy”
Freud tells us that neurotics have a tendency to repeat their trauma rather than remember it. Long before I read Freud, I learned this from Peanuts. Lucy will always pull away the football at the last second, and Charlie Brown will always believe that this time will be different. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat teaches the same lesson: Krazy’s attempts to woo the mouse Ignatz always end with Ignatz beaning Krazy with a brick. But Krazy, undeterred, woos again tomorrow.
Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy is different. The compulsion to repeat is present (Nancy is constantly thinking up ways to get rich, none of which pan out), but the real lesson is that you just never know what’s going to happen or why. You get things wrong; things go wrong. A great many Nancy strips turn on a question of misunderstanding—misunderstanding how words work, how social relations work, how money works, how society works, how objects work, how people work. Here we must turn from Freud to his boldest interpreter, Jacques Lacan: “The very foundation of interhuman discourse is misunderstanding.”
Of course, that’s just how jokes work. Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden, in their gloriously bonkers How to Read “Nancy,” quote psychologist Jerry M. Suls: “the perceiver finds his expectations about the text disconfirmed by the ending of the joke.” But Nancy’s endings disconfirm expectations in ways that call into question the very nature of expectation and confirmation.
If Peanuts is the purest distillation of the newspaper comic strip, Walt Kelly’s Pogo the most subversive, and Krazy Kat the artiest, Bushmiller’s Nancy is at once the subtlest and the most obvious. Bushmiller follows the basic formula: two to four panels, minimal linework—a setup, a gag (a “snapper,” in Bushmiller’s parlance). But often the gags aren’t exactly, you know, funny. They’re weird, a little off-kilter. Consider this strip, in which a neighbor places a telephone call to Nancy so she can hold the phone up to the dog howling outside her window.
Is this funny? The gag is that instead of leaning out the window to yell at the dog, he phones Nancy and asks her to put the dog on the phone, even though dogs don’t take phone calls, and people don’t call dogs on the phone, nor do they wake their neighbors in the middle of the night with phone calls intended for dogs, and dogs don’t understand English anyway. Why does he yell “Shut up”? Why do I, for that matter, tell my cat, Ursula, to “get down” from the counter? Why not “get up” or “play ‘Free Bird’”? I waved at a dog the other day. What did I suppose it was getting out of that interaction? These are some of the thoughts that the gag produced for me. What it didn’t produce was laughter.
My friend Dash Shaw, a cartoonist and filmmaker, told me that his response to Peanuts is usually “Aw, that’s how life is”—“whereas my response to a good Nancy gag is ‘Wow, weird.’ It’s often a Magritte-like image. ‘Huh, wow.’” Peanuts has its surreal moments too, such as the series in which Sally falls in love with the school building, which turns out to be capable of thought. “I’ve been suffering in silence for sixty years, kid,” thinks the building. But Nancy produces the “huh, weird” response as a rule.
The cartoonist Bill Griffith, in his biography of Bushmiller, Three Rocks, has an idea about this: “Nancy doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be a child. Nancy tells you what it’s like to be a comic strip.” In part, Griffith is thinking of Bushmiller’s deployment of the formal elements of the comics medium, what Karasik and Newgarden call “a complex amalgam of formal rules laid out by a master of design.” In his introduction to How to Read “Nancy,” James Elkins contrasts Nancy’s “ultra-clean” lines with Mondrian’s “fractal” lines. But like Mondrian’s, Bushmiller’s art “appears to be clear-cut” but “is fraught with hidden subtleties.” These subtleties include Bushmiller’s mastery of panel spacing, object inclusion, balloon placement, and use of solid black—details easily missed by an original audience reading the strip in a cheaply printed and disposable format over breakfast.
But Griffith’s insight also reminds me of something Paul de Man wrote about a poem by Shelley:
The Triumph of Life warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence.
That is an insane philosophy (de Man had his reasons for opposing history), but I recall how Ernie Bushmiller would often come up with the last panel, the snapper, first, then work his way backwards to find the set-up. “Meaning is supplied retroactively,” Lacan’s translator Bruce Fink says of the unconscious.
People, Bushmiller said once, “just like to lead nice, gentle lives and read about normal everyday events.” “At least until the last panel,” Karasik and Newgarden add, which exposes the randomness lurking within the gentle everyday. This is why Nancy is so often ironically recontextualized—most famously by Joe Brainard and Andy Warhol. It is easy to imagine each panel floating as its own random event, a disconnected memento mori.
I’m just riffing here, obviously, and bullshitting a little, but that’s what Nancy makes me want to do—free-associate, drift away. Anyway, New York Review Comics has just published a new Bushmiller collection, Nancy & Sluggo’s Guide to Life, that restores some of the finest and best-loved strips to print. If you want to know what it’s like to be a comic strip, you need to get your mitts on a copy. Or as Nancy puts it, “I just ate 36 feet of spaghetti.” Huh, weird.
Michael Robbins is the author of three books of poems, most recently Walkman, and a book of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music. He has written for Book Post on Allen Ginsberg, Paul Muldoon, Rilke, Proust and the Grateful Dead, apocaplypse by fire, the destruction of animals, and cheesy reading.
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A great but underrated strip.
Even as a child, I found Nancy beguiling and bewildering; I hated the strip, but always read it. This is a wonderful expose of what the Nancy experience is like. Sluggo was really the uncanny, with that hat.