How to Read Nancy Re-Considered,
an "open" letter to authors Karasik and Newgarden:
Dear Paul (and Mark),
I applaud your ambition and audacity. I had not heard of Ken Jacobs' Meet John Doe lectures. His nervous system performances at Anthology (Laurel & Hardy's Berthmarks) and MOMI (of early LES footage) and elsewhere (Walter Reade ? at Lincoln Center) remain among my favorite memories of moviegoing in NYC.
There is much to commend, also, in tackling great and exceptional works. In 1988, Nancy might have seemed a banal choice, a piss-take, or a reaction against the emerging taking-comics-seriousness. Almost three decades (!) later and with 266 more pages, I'm still unsure that you've adequately accounted for the exceptionalism of both Bushmiller and this particular strip. About the exceptionalism of this strip: The facelessness of Nancy is unusual and, I think, demonstrates some eighties artsy-ness in making this choice; I page through my Nancy collections and cannot find a similar strip where a faceless main character confronts the other main character (both immediately recognizable, however, from Bushmiller's strong character design). The hose gag, and your exploration of its comic/movie prehistory, is one of the book's highlights, so I am nonetheless glad you stuck with your strip choice.
As to Bushmiller's exceptionalism, more on that later.
ONE UNEASY PANEL
Your reimagining of The Strip as a single-panel gag with captioned dialogue breaks one of the fundamental rules of such panels: The speaker of the dialogue is potentially ambiguous. Changing one or both characters' faces would have resolved this ambiguity; showing a tight-lipped smirking Nancy would have worked. It's actually surprising that the hose gag works no matter what direction the water is traveling: in the single-panel flipped version, the leaky faucet is the punchline in the confrontation; in the original, the leaky faucet sets up the punchline, which is Sluggo's menacing overconfidence.
And it's Sluggo's expression that brings me further consternation. In your analysis of the strip, you do acknowledge Sluggo's shift in expression in the last panel, but that invites some unexplained incongruities in Sluggo's actions: In panels one and two, Sluggo is gleefully squirting his opponent, his brow is unfurrowed as he cackles his challenge to his unarmed opponents, "Draw, you varmint." Now in the third (and final) panel, Sluggo's already issued the same challenge to Nancy, but his gun remains holstered and his expression is more simply menacing. He is grinning, not so obviously speaking. Might he be just beginning to speak? (Conjecture creeps in....)
Balloons, word and otherwise filled, are strange, comic-specific things. Perhaps they hang above their speakers a few moments before they float away in subsequent panels? That would account for this apparent discrepancy in Sluggo's words and actions. (I refuse to use the term "timing.") Another possibility results from a consideration of Bushmiller's crafting of his last panels first. He liked Sluggo's expression. Perhaps he considered keeping the final panel dialogue-free or leaving Sluggo's challenge begun but incomplete (i.e., "Draw--", which I think would've been funnier). In dumbing it down, obeying the "rule" of three, an urban legend, he repeats the challenge in full.
THE FOURTH PANEL PROBLEM, or IN THE GUTTER WITH FREUD....
Your closing analytical chapters rather baldly defy a command of your preamble: Stick with the observable. There is no fourth panel; there is nothing in the gutter (unless an Aragones gag lost its way en route to MAD-ness).
Bushmiller's own term, "snapper", for the funny, usually terminal, panels in his strips provides one clue to unraveling this fourth panel problem. Picture the probable fourth panel in The Strip: A torrent of water obliterates Sluggo's (surprised) face; Nancy laughs. Slapstick? Certainly. Funny? Maybe. But the setup is funnier, and in Bushmiller's rightful opinion, "snaps" more; he would have drawn the funniest option.
The Strip does invite a reader's creative participation more than most other Nancy strips. Bushmiller primarily crafted jokes, but those Nancy fourth-panel strips enter into the realm of the comic. Take a longer look at Freud's Jokes book for this distinction, though the good doctor admits that the comic is beyond his scope as it has been for other great philosophers (p. 224-225, second half of the first paragraph of Chapter VII); also note his nuanced observation that jokes are made and that the comic is found. The common Bushmiller joke categories on pages 68 and 69 are straight out of Freud.
More Freud is unnecessary, though. Imagine the undrawn fourth panels of the strips you've selected for that portion of the DIY section (p. 262): Bushmiller's snappy setup is funnier than the implied fourth panel.
CARTOONING BACKWARDS FOR FORWARD READERS
I wish that you had developed further, for at least one more appendix, another of your 1988 insights: that Nancy was algebra masquerading as a comic strip. Pass those eight plunger strips (p.66-67) off to a sympathetic mathematical colleague and see what happens: Solve for P.
Math scares most funny people away, but Bushmiller was not most funny people. His focus on crafting (primarily) visual snappers for his final panels, then working backwards to the strip's beginning IS alebraic. Those 1925 puzzle strips for The New York World suggest this approach developed early. This idiosyncracy makes Bushmiller an atypical cartoonist and, since How to Read Nancy, like other theses on understanding comics, stumbles into pedagogy, this idiosyncracy may mislead students of the form.
Your dissection and deconstruction of the elements of The Strip, especially in the book, glosses over this Bushmiller quirk by sticking to a dis-assembly line imported from movie-making. I wish you had worked harder to avoid furthering this conflation of film and comics terminologies and analyses; in this respect, I favor the 1988 version, which better highlights a couple comic-specific tricks: spotting blacks and the swelling horizon line. Too, I suspect that comic students might feel somewhat overwhelmed, if not stymied, by too many choices in a universe of details.
(If the end of that last sentence gives you pause, it should: It's my tribute to your gutter howler -- "a realm of relativity where time and space mutely commingle." That should have been left misspelled in the '80s. Sounds great, especially to art students, suggesting more, too much more, than it means.)
As to the structure of your analytical chapters, Context/Text often seemed a bit amorphous to me and I might have preferred Cartoonist/Reader observations, a major change. Burying the gutter between panels two and three in the book's gutter was occasionally annoying and the separation between those two panels was not always maintained. Perhaps this detail can be addressed in a second printing?
I did like the pithy morals, however. Their echo of Victorian-era primer techniques is appreciated.
Next installment is
HOSE GAG REVISITED
or HOW TO READ HAPPY HOOLIGAN (or DREAMY DAVE?)
Coming tomorrow or Friday....
an "open" letter to authors Karasik and Newgarden:
Dear Paul (and Mark),
I applaud your ambition and audacity. I had not heard of Ken Jacobs' Meet John Doe lectures. His nervous system performances at Anthology (Laurel & Hardy's Berthmarks) and MOMI (of early LES footage) and elsewhere (Walter Reade ? at Lincoln Center) remain among my favorite memories of moviegoing in NYC.
There is much to commend, also, in tackling great and exceptional works. In 1988, Nancy might have seemed a banal choice, a piss-take, or a reaction against the emerging taking-comics-seriousness. Almost three decades (!) later and with 266 more pages, I'm still unsure that you've adequately accounted for the exceptionalism of both Bushmiller and this particular strip. About the exceptionalism of this strip: The facelessness of Nancy is unusual and, I think, demonstrates some eighties artsy-ness in making this choice; I page through my Nancy collections and cannot find a similar strip where a faceless main character confronts the other main character (both immediately recognizable, however, from Bushmiller's strong character design). The hose gag, and your exploration of its comic/movie prehistory, is one of the book's highlights, so I am nonetheless glad you stuck with your strip choice.
As to Bushmiller's exceptionalism, more on that later.
ONE UNEASY PANEL
Your reimagining of The Strip as a single-panel gag with captioned dialogue breaks one of the fundamental rules of such panels: The speaker of the dialogue is potentially ambiguous. Changing one or both characters' faces would have resolved this ambiguity; showing a tight-lipped smirking Nancy would have worked. It's actually surprising that the hose gag works no matter what direction the water is traveling: in the single-panel flipped version, the leaky faucet is the punchline in the confrontation; in the original, the leaky faucet sets up the punchline, which is Sluggo's menacing overconfidence.
And it's Sluggo's expression that brings me further consternation. In your analysis of the strip, you do acknowledge Sluggo's shift in expression in the last panel, but that invites some unexplained incongruities in Sluggo's actions: In panels one and two, Sluggo is gleefully squirting his opponent, his brow is unfurrowed as he cackles his challenge to his unarmed opponents, "Draw, you varmint." Now in the third (and final) panel, Sluggo's already issued the same challenge to Nancy, but his gun remains holstered and his expression is more simply menacing. He is grinning, not so obviously speaking. Might he be just beginning to speak? (Conjecture creeps in....)
Balloons, word and otherwise filled, are strange, comic-specific things. Perhaps they hang above their speakers a few moments before they float away in subsequent panels? That would account for this apparent discrepancy in Sluggo's words and actions. (I refuse to use the term "timing.") Another possibility results from a consideration of Bushmiller's crafting of his last panels first. He liked Sluggo's expression. Perhaps he considered keeping the final panel dialogue-free or leaving Sluggo's challenge begun but incomplete (i.e., "Draw--", which I think would've been funnier). In dumbing it down, obeying the "rule" of three, an urban legend, he repeats the challenge in full.
THE FOURTH PANEL PROBLEM, or IN THE GUTTER WITH FREUD....
Your closing analytical chapters rather baldly defy a command of your preamble: Stick with the observable. There is no fourth panel; there is nothing in the gutter (unless an Aragones gag lost its way en route to MAD-ness).
Bushmiller's own term, "snapper", for the funny, usually terminal, panels in his strips provides one clue to unraveling this fourth panel problem. Picture the probable fourth panel in The Strip: A torrent of water obliterates Sluggo's (surprised) face; Nancy laughs. Slapstick? Certainly. Funny? Maybe. But the setup is funnier, and in Bushmiller's rightful opinion, "snaps" more; he would have drawn the funniest option.
The Strip does invite a reader's creative participation more than most other Nancy strips. Bushmiller primarily crafted jokes, but those Nancy fourth-panel strips enter into the realm of the comic. Take a longer look at Freud's Jokes book for this distinction, though the good doctor admits that the comic is beyond his scope as it has been for other great philosophers (p. 224-225, second half of the first paragraph of Chapter VII); also note his nuanced observation that jokes are made and that the comic is found. The common Bushmiller joke categories on pages 68 and 69 are straight out of Freud.
More Freud is unnecessary, though. Imagine the undrawn fourth panels of the strips you've selected for that portion of the DIY section (p. 262): Bushmiller's snappy setup is funnier than the implied fourth panel.
CARTOONING BACKWARDS FOR FORWARD READERS
I wish that you had developed further, for at least one more appendix, another of your 1988 insights: that Nancy was algebra masquerading as a comic strip. Pass those eight plunger strips (p.66-67) off to a sympathetic mathematical colleague and see what happens: Solve for P.
Math scares most funny people away, but Bushmiller was not most funny people. His focus on crafting (primarily) visual snappers for his final panels, then working backwards to the strip's beginning IS alebraic. Those 1925 puzzle strips for The New York World suggest this approach developed early. This idiosyncracy makes Bushmiller an atypical cartoonist and, since How to Read Nancy, like other theses on understanding comics, stumbles into pedagogy, this idiosyncracy may mislead students of the form.
Your dissection and deconstruction of the elements of The Strip, especially in the book, glosses over this Bushmiller quirk by sticking to a dis-assembly line imported from movie-making. I wish you had worked harder to avoid furthering this conflation of film and comics terminologies and analyses; in this respect, I favor the 1988 version, which better highlights a couple comic-specific tricks: spotting blacks and the swelling horizon line. Too, I suspect that comic students might feel somewhat overwhelmed, if not stymied, by too many choices in a universe of details.
(If the end of that last sentence gives you pause, it should: It's my tribute to your gutter howler -- "a realm of relativity where time and space mutely commingle." That should have been left misspelled in the '80s. Sounds great, especially to art students, suggesting more, too much more, than it means.)
As to the structure of your analytical chapters, Context/Text often seemed a bit amorphous to me and I might have preferred Cartoonist/Reader observations, a major change. Burying the gutter between panels two and three in the book's gutter was occasionally annoying and the separation between those two panels was not always maintained. Perhaps this detail can be addressed in a second printing?
I did like the pithy morals, however. Their echo of Victorian-era primer techniques is appreciated.
Next installment is
HOSE GAG REVISITED
or HOW TO READ HAPPY HOOLIGAN (or DREAMY DAVE?)
Coming tomorrow or Friday....
Comments
Post a Comment