Nancy and Sluggo's Guide to Life

If you were alive in twentieth-century America, you knew Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy—and this new collection assembles some of the greatest strips featuring the much-loved cartoon icon and her pug-nosed companion, Sluggo.

The newspaper cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller once admitted that “all my characters are conceived in desperation.” Nancy was no exception. She was the niece of the star of his other strip, Fritzi Ritzi, and meant to serve as a throwaway gag character. But Nancy could not be contained: Within a few years, Bushmiller’s strip had been renamed for her, and she had begun her ascent into the pantheon of cartooning greats.

Nancy, along with on-and-off boyfriend Sluggo, delivered absurd laughs to readers for decades, all rendered in Bushmiller’s distinctive line that cartoonist Denis Kitchen once called “geometric perfection.” A masterpiece of humor and cartooning, Nancy earned both scorn and acclaim for decades, serving as a muse (and sometimes punching bag) for the likes of Andy Warhol, Joe Brainard, Gary Panter, Matt Groening, and more.

This collection of Bushmiller’s Nancy brings together a selection from the beloved Kitchen Sink Press editions of Nancy strips, including How Sluggo Survives! and Nancy Eats Food, as well as a number of newly selected cartoons.

Together, this wide-ranging collection offers a chance for readers to experience the full range of Bushmiller’s absurd humor and unexpected visual delights. As Nancy once said: “Anything can happen in a comic strip!”

Ernie Bushmiller (1905–1982) was an American cartoonist best known for creating the daily comic strip Nancy, which has remained in print since 1938. After completing the eighth grade, Bushmiller dropped out of school and began working as a copy boy at the New York World. There, he ran errands, observed his cartoonist colleagues, and eventually picked up illustration assignments such as lettering speech balloons and designing crossword puzzles. In 1925, he was given the chance to take over Larry Whittington’s comic strip Fritzi Ritz, which evolved into the long-running strip Nancy.

Denis Kitchen is a cartoonist, writer, and publisher. In 1969, after the success of his self-published Mom’s Homemade Comics, Kitchen launched Kitchen Sink Press to publish his own work and the work of other underground cartoonists. In its thirty-year run, Kitchen Sink published work by both new and older cartoonists including R. Crumb, Alice Kominsky-Crumb, Will Eisner, Milton Caniff, Charles Burns, Alan Moore, M. K. Brown, and Ernie Bushmiller. A monograph of Kitchen’s own work, The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen, was published in 2010 by Dark Horse Comics and was nominated for both Harvey and Eisner Awards. Originally from Wisconsin, he now lives in Western Massachusetts.