"How to Read Nancy" is an influential essay by Mark Newgarden

Mark Newgarden

Mark Newgarden is an American underground cartoonist. His work has appeared widely, and his influential shape-shifting weekly feature Newgarden, which appeared in alternative weekly newspapers like New York Press, created a cult following for the artist.Newgarden's work has appeared in a diverse...

 and Paul Karasik

Paul Karasik

Paul Karasik is an American cartoonist, editor, and teacher, notable for his contributions to such works as City of Glass: The Graphic Novel, The Ride Together: A Memoir of Autism in the Family, and I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets.- Biography :In the early 1980s, after having graduated...

, originally published in The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy by Brian Walker (Henry Holt/Comicana, 1988). The piece examines the comic strip Nancy

Nancy (comic strip)

Nancy is an American daily and Sunday comic strip, originally written and drawn by Ernie Bushmiller and distributed by United Feature Syndicate....

, focusing on Bushmiller

Ernie Bushmiller

Ernest Paul Bushmiller, Jr. was an American cartoonist, best known for creating the long-running daily comic strip Nancy....

’s precise and exacting use of the comics language in its essential form to deliver a gag. Finding correspondences to the minimalist architecture of Mies Van Der Rohe, the essay calls Nancy “a complex amalgam of formal rules laid out by [its] designer.”

Deconstruction

“How to Read Nancy” is distinguished by its extensive deconstruction of a single Nancy comic strip originally published on August 8, 1959. The essay successively isolates and analyzes the individual formal elements of this strip one-by-one (including the placement of word balloons, the level of the horizon line, the spotting of blacks, and panel shape and size) to demonstrate each codependent aspect of comics syntax. The essay has frequently been used in a variety of university level courses about comics; a full 25% of syllabi listed on the National Association of Comics Arts Educators (NACAE) website include the essay in their required reading.

“How to Read Nancy” is an outgrowth of Karasik and Newgarden’s lifelong interest in Bushmiller’s work. Newgarden had previously drawn “Love’s Savage Fury,” a four-page tribute to Nancy originally published in RAW Magazine v. 1 #7 in 1986 (also republished in The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy), and the pair had assigned a Nancy-related assignment to students in a “Language of Comics” class that they co-taught in the 1980s at the School of Visual Arts

School of Visual Arts

The School of Visual Arts , is a proprietary art school located in Manhattan, New York City, and is widely considered to be one of the leading art schools in the United States. It was established in 1947 by co-founders Silas H. Rhodes and Burne Hogarth as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and...

 in New York. One example of student work from that class, cartoonist R. Sikoryak’s “Ancy,” was later published in Legal Action Comics

Legal Action Comics

Legal Action Comics is a series of comics anthologies edited by illustrator Danny Hellman which features work from many alternative comics artists.The first volume in the series was published in 2001, and the second followed in 2003...

v. 1.

Book

“How to Read Nancy” was at one time archived on the NACAE website, but is currently available as a PDF download from Newgarden’s own website. Karasik and Newgarden are currently expanding the essay to book-length. The book is scheduled to be published in 2012 by Fantagraphics Books

Fantagraphics Books

Fantagraphics Books is an American publisher of alternative comics, classic comic strip anthologies, magazines, graphic novels, and the adult-oriented Eros Comix imprint...

as a companion to a projected multi-volume Nancy reprint series.