Having now looked at your site, I am even more humbled by the compliment, thank you again. After reading some of the above comments I went to Ray Braswell’s Warsaw Times link to discover just how far from the original my guesswork in fact was. (Edit: Ray Braswell’s is post 23 in this thread. Since I wrote this post he has returned and edited his post and reproduced the art in the post rather than just leaving a link as he had originally).
Interestingly one of the details I had felt was wrong was that the skirt lacked in a more pronounced angularity, and I was correct in that assessment. But I got the leg totally wrong. Jason Holm (post 12 I think) got it much closer. (Edit 1: Ah. Now I realize Jason Holm found the archived version of it and based his restoration on that. It’s great learning in public like this. Edit 2: I should have said he “got it much closer in terms of shape”, I think mine gets it much closer in “feel”. Since I wrote this post, he too returned later and edited his post, reproducing the art in the post rather than merely leaving a link).
So, anyway, my attempt at guessing what Nancy would’ve looked like was not very accurate. An interesting experiment nonetheless, and I think my rendering and reproduction was okay. (Edit: In other words, it was oddly convincing for a guess, perhaps because of the verisimilitude in atmosphere, which I think is to do with whether you can imbue magic, or love, into the lines you create, in contrast to just simply doing lines to represent something).
Reproducing the Warsaw Times version below. Unfortunately I haven’t got a decent resolution on it, but the general shape is clear enough to see the contrast. (And re-reproducing mine for ease of comparison).
Conclusion? No. No I can’t draw Nancy.
Further Notes:
Just to clarify, I did my version without referring to other posts on here, nor to any archived version of the original. I only had the Fantagraphics’ incomplete version to go on, and research of other Nancy strips didn’t really help as she in fact doesn’t seem to occupy the all-fours position very often in the strips I found.
You can see that I was basing Nancy’s leg on the general dimensions of Sluggo’s in that panel. Also, I had ‘felt’ that there should be a space between the outline of Nancy’s skirt and foot, and the left panel border, as that is generally a rule especially in pre-1950’s comics, (and was in fact what Bushmiller had done) ; to try and make sure the whole figure is in-panel, not truncated. Extending the distance of the left panel border to accommodate the figure didn’t look right, so that solution was discarded. It was painful to do, but I went against the whole-figure-in-panel ‘instinct’ because Sluggo is cut off by the border in the next panel, so I thought it might not be visually dissonant to allow the border to cut off Nancy’s foot. Wrong.
AbeL (post 12 in this thread) seems to have ‘sensed’ that Nancy’s body may have been slightly smaller for panel economy reasons, and I have a suspicion Bushmiller made her body slightly smaller than he usually would for the same reasons in that panel. I seem to have made a contemporary fat Nancy.
It’s interesting how many people, independently of each other, correctly worked out what she was probably saying. I worried about the word fence for a long time before committing to it. At one point I had considered “rolled under there” based on the fact Nancy is pointing at the gap at the bottom of the fence.
When I first drew the outline of the word bubble it was actually closer to what Bushmiller had done, with a more pronounced upward arc towards the border, yet I had not been happy with that and made it less circular, to mirror Sluggo’s word bubble. Wrong again.
I may have suppressed the ‘expression’ in the skirt because I had over-sized the lettering and thus the word bubble, and to retain the sense of that compositional rule of not making things look ‘packed tight’, I had to keep space between the top of the skirt and the bottom of the word bubble.
Judging by Nancy’s face in panel 2, the Warsaw Times version may have been tampered with, as it seems to differ from the one Fantagraphics posted.
