5/23/07: RightWingTrashWoman: NancyBack when they were launching the
Simpsons comic book imprint, Matt Groening proclaimed Lisa Simpson to be the first real cartoon role model for young girls. There were two reasons he got away with that:
Simpsons fans know a lot less than they think, and Sluggo isn’t a real person.
In fact, Ernest Bushmiller had already created a wonderful little heroine. Nancy isn’t just a fine role model for young girls. She’s a fine role model for any of us who have to deal with surreal settings on a regular basis. That’s been pretty much all of us since around 1960.
It wasn’t until 1969 that Nancy marched with a blank billboard and proclaimed herself as part of the Silent Majority. In 1960, however, she refused to baby-sit an ugly little bald kid who kept pounding on a table with his shoe. It was only a decade later when she launched a funny balloon in the shape of a man sticking out his tongue. The thing floated all the way to Havana and gave Fidel Castro a conniption fit.
Even the dogs in Nancy’s world didn’t like it when some longhaired Afghans moved into the neighborhood. Sadly, that same world didn’t protect Nancy from idiot adults. Screeching TV pundits gave her a nightmare about the environment as early as 1970. By 1976, Aunt Fritzi was hosting women’s lib meetings and ordering a puzzled Nancy to go outdoors and build a snowperson.
At least Fritzi appreciated Nancy as a $600 exemption on the family income tax. Like any good Republican, though, Nancy was occasional misunderstood. Sluggo once spent a Christmas Eve troubled over how a greedy Nancy had covered the neighborhood with signs directing Santa to her house—having no idea that Nancy’s final sign was by the chimney, asking that all her presents be given to her needy boyfriend.
(Sluggo, incidentally, took pride in sharing his birthday with another poor boy who’d grown up to be a Republican president. Our personal favorite strip is when he finds a hammer and sickle in a hardware store, and decides to report the grumpy owner to the FBI.)
A 1971 strip had Nancy complaining about how the “permissive society” still didn’t mean that Aunt Fritzi would let her go to the movies. Fortunately, Nancy found a way to get exposed to some good useful violence. There’s a great strip where Sluggo is dousing local kids with a water pistol. An alert Nancy responds by putting on a holster and filling it with a garden hose. This is one of the rare times, incidentally, in which an atypically malevolent Sluggo is wearing black. Nancy lives in a world where good guys can escalate with confidence—and it would even be reported in the daily newspapers. Now, that’s surreal.
Make her your own: All the examples here have been drawn from
The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy. Sadly, that may be the only one of the many out-of-print Bushmiller compilations that can be found at a reasonable price. The book also includes insightful text on the artist and the creation—including an impressive dissection of that strip with Nancy and the garden hose.
