Three Rocks
The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From Bill Griffith, the acclaimed creator of Zippy the Pinhead, comes a history of comics as told through the life story of Ernie Bushmiller and his iconic comic strip Nancy.
“As the widest-ranging cartoon chronicler of American absurdity in our time, Bill Griffith has topped himself. This is an instant comic-strip classic!” —Matt Groening, The Simpsons
From Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead and Nobody’s Fool, comes Three Rocks, a biography of cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller, creator of the iconic comic strip Nancy. But this graphic novel is about more than a single comic book artist. It is the story of this American art form, tracing its inception to 1895 with the Yellow Kid, the creation of Nancy in 1933, and all the strips that followed, including Peanuts and The Far Side. When Bushmiller died in 1982, Nancy was running in almost 900 daily newspapers—a number few syndicated cartoonists ever achieve.
Nancy is hailed as the “perfect” comic strip by fans and cartoonists alike. The title Three Rocks refers to the trope of three hemispherical rocks often seen in a Bushmiller landscape—just enough to communicate environment to the reader. This distillation is exemplary of the iconic, diagrammatic look of Nancy, a comic strip about the nature of what it means to be a comic strip—the perfect avatar for Griffith to expand upon his philosophy of creating comics.
“For many years, I’ve devoured Bill Griffith’s work. It’s always inspiring and engrossing. As it never fails to do, Griffith’s brilliance and consummate drawing chops shine through. Three Rocks is amazing!” —Emil Ferris, author of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One master of comics arts pays tribute to another in this inventive graphic biography of Ernie Bushmiller (1905–1982), creator of the long-running strip Nancy. Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead) and his Zen surrealist nonchalance might seem an odd fit for the ostensibly square Bushmiller. He certainly plays with form, inserting himself into the narrative and rearranging Bushmiller's artwork—but he's earnest about Nancy: "the perfect expression of what comics are." The Bronx-born Bushmiller, as a funnies-obsessed 19-year-old high school dropout copy boy at the New York World, got a lucky break in 1925 when he was offered the gig to take over a cheesecake strip about a flapper named Fritzi. After he gave Fritzi a trouble-prone niece named Nancy in 1933, he found "the little dickens was soon stealing the show." As Bushmiller advances from success to success with the retitled strip, Griffith resists seeking darkness beneath the contented exterior of an artist who married happily, read voraciously, and lived the suburban life in Connecticut. Contemporaries including actor Harold Lloyd, Krazy Kat's George Herriman, and Flash Gordon's Alex Raymond make cameos. Griffith points to the strip's meta narratives and concise absurdist non-punch-lines (Nancy blows a gum bubble so large a confused Martian sees it) as proof that this little dickens meant more than the space she filled in back pages. It's a surprisingly satisfying homage to an undersung artist.
