A post title which would also apply to quantum mechanics, but not in this case. Instead, it’s about a nearly 300 page book dedicated to a single cartoon strip. I haven’t actually read it (my unread stack is too high already), so let’s go to Pat Padua’s review in Spectrum Culture back in October ’17:
You’re heard of the 33 1/3rd series of small books written about a single beloved album? Cartoonists Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik take the deep reading approach even further with a 276-page book about a three-panel comic strip—a single, three-panel Nancy strip published on August 8, 1959. How to Read Nancy is a nearly 300-page expansion of an article that the authors wrote in 1988 for the collection, The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy that seemed to be the definitive analysis of an often-dismissed art form. It turns out that article was just the beginning.
Coming under microscopic analysis is a strip that depicts a variation on the old “hose gag.” Nancy, whose face we never see in this particular strip, watches from a distance as Sluggo, armed with a water pistol, confronts neighborhood kids with the Western cliché, “Draw, you varmint!” (Crucially, as the authors note, punctuation is merely implied.) In the final panel, Sluggo approaches his goil with the same warning; but unbeknownst to the would-be gunslinger, Nancy’s holster sheaths the end of a long garden hose ready to burst his bubble.
It seems simple enough, but those three panels, with their sharply-defined lines, selective blacks and significant negative space, hold a world of context and myriad decisions that make it work so efficiently.
The ability to isolate the aesthetic elements of a particular art form from a single specimen can often help clarify the process to a successful rendition of other members of that art form. They can also speak to those elements which derive from the evolutionary drives to which we’re all subject in this cultural context. While that may seems a sterile enough sentiment, there’s something satisfying in understanding why a particular art work really works – or if it’s admirers are really just poseurs.
And, really, I wasn’t aware that Nancy had such a large following.
