I’m not going to say a whole lot about this collection because the foreword and introduction covers everything I would want to say quite well. Briefly, Ernie Bushmiller did not create the Nancy strip. (Well, he did and he didn’t.) Fritzi Ritz began in 1922 by Larry Whittington. Bushmiller took over in 1925, he introduced Fritzi’s niece Nancy in 1933, and she soon took over the strip. Nancy is Happy collects daily strips form 1943-1945.
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t like Nancy when I was young. It was just too corny. I was aware of its resurgence in popularity throughout the 1980s in the wake of Bushmiller’s death, but I never sought to revisit it until now. Nancy would come to achieve an almost Zen-like quality in its later years, but the strips in this collection were quite surprising to me. At first blush, they seem to be drawn in the same simple style I remember growing up, but closer inspection reveals hidden details in the artwork. Also, the strips are not gag-a-day but rather gag-a-week, as each Monday through Friday sequence presents its own little themed continuity.
I enjoyed this volume and look forward to more. It would also be nice to read some of the early pre-Nancy, pre-Bushmiller Fritzi Ritz strips reprinted from the beginning. (I have heard that some of them were quite racy.) It would be interesting to compare them to Blondie now that the earliest of those strips have been collected in two volumes.
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