Also Alley Oop was originally just the sidekick of Australopithecus Andy
I have an original 1943 Nancy Sunday page on which Bushmiller pasted over a panel with a second thought on the composition. I can see it a little through the paper. Some day, Iâll slip it off there (the rubber cement is probably brittle now anyway) and Iâll be the first one since Ernie himself to have seen a drawing from his hand.
Iâm not in a hurry to do it, but itâs fun to think about.
That is interesting. The funnies page I mean.
The only thing that made me slightly laugh was the Buggs Bunny and that was because of its relevance to the RSS feeders etc., the comics, paying for reading and the copyright conundrum.
50s must have sucked when it came to comics.
Ack, donât do that! It will destroy the drawing. You should be able to see whatâs underneath just by using a good lightbox.
God, I loathed Nancy. Yet, like a car accident, it was impossible not to look at.
An upvote, simply becauseâŚâWarsaw Timesâ
Ok, all of you have convinced me that NANCY is Great Art.
And I think past posts here did the same with LITTLE LULU.
Now⌠do HENRY!
When did you start loathing Nancy? After Bushmiller died, or before?
The reproduction isnât quite the quality that would make Princess Sparklepony swoon, but it may have to do
Of course not. Itâs always penises. Every single time.
(Edited due to 403 error)
Todd: Okay, you sit down to read your paper, and youâre enjoying your entire two page comic spread, right? And thereâs âThe Family-fuckinâ-Circusâ in the bottom right-hand corner just waiting to suck. And thatâs the last thing you read, so it spoils everything you read before.
Claire: You could just not read it.
Todd: I hate it, yet Iâm uncontrollably drawn to it. Are you gonnaâŚ
JFYI 403 forbidden
I know you said be creative, and I probably could, but there are plenty of clever ones here. This is just a straight attempt.
Iâm impressed! Really good job!
There are minute adjustments I would make actually, but thanks.
Ach! Balls. I put a new link to it. Better yet Iâll just upload it.
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 Braswellâs Warsaw Times link to discover just how far from the original my guesswork in fact was. (Edit: Ray Braswellâs 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. Itâs great learning in public like this. Edit 2: I should have said he âgot it much closer in terms of shapeâ, I think mine gets it much closer in âfeelâ. 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 wouldâve 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 havenât 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 canât 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 Fantagraphicsâ incomplete version to go on, and research of other Nancy strips didnât really help as she in fact doesnât seem to occupy the all-fours position very often in the strips I found.
You can see that I was basing Nancyâs leg on the general dimensions of Sluggoâs in that panel. Also, I had âfeltâ that there should be a space between the outline of Nancyâs skirt and foot, and the left panel border, as that is generally a rule especially in pre-1950âs 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 didnât look right, so that solution was discarded. It was painful to do, but I went against the whole-figure-in-panel âinstinctâ 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 Nancyâs foot. Wrong.
AbeL (post 12 in this thread) seems to have âsensedâ that Nancyâs 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.
Itâs 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 ârolled under thereâ 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 Sluggoâs word bubble. Wrong again.
I may have suppressed the âexpressionâ 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 âpacked tightâ, I had to keep space between the top of the skirt and the bottom of the word bubble.
Judging by Nancyâs face in panel 2, the Warsaw Times version may have been tampered with, as it seems to differ from the one Fantagraphics posted.
That happened to me when I first started on here (I got so mad about it I did a comic on here about it). It sorts itself out after youâve browsed for a while I think.
