how to read nancy

I found this book pretty unputdownable and the fore and aft matter (description of Ernie Bushmiller's life and precursors to Nancy at the front; various intriguing appendices and related material at the back) pretty fascinating. It's a beautiful production as well in terms of its clean design.

The text is forensic and at the centre is an in-depth analysis of just one Nancy strip from the late 1950s with all the component parts reviewed: how do we 'read' a strip like this, what are the tropes it depends on, how is our eye guided, what does the text mean (in the example used, the text is the same phrase three times over) and so on. It's more about Bushmiller's skill as a comic strip artist than it is about Nancy or anything intrinsic to her, except that Nancy is a crucial element in the best of Bushmiller's work.

After reading this I started on John Taylor's autobiography. Really intriguing stuff about early Birmingham days and a chapter on being a Birmingham 'flaneur' in the mid-70s which I might even use in teaching next year. I don't know if I'll persist into the decadence decades though (I'm at Seven and the Ragged Tiger now).

Nancy 2019

Nancy the perfect cat is named for Nancy Sinatra, of course, and her boots (not seen here). That's a no-brainer. Initially I named her Riley (that's what she's called on her desexing certificate, I hope that doesn't ever  cause a problem). I had this idea of her living the life of riley, you see, so she would be out in the world having adventures and sometimes coming back to check in but never really being a domesticated cat. At the time she was so wild you couldn't even touch her. So it was a bit arrogant calling her Riley in a way because it was like 'you live your life and just feel grateful that you can', but on the other hand, the council would have had her put down as an unredeemable feral. But as all three cats in the room with me right now show, no-one is ever an unredeemable feral. A few minutes ago (Nancy will be disgusted to read) I had Pompey and Chanticleer both crawling over me purring. These were cats who a few months ago would not let a person touch them (I don't think anyone ever had) and would constantly hiss at anyone other than each other.

Anyway I actually came here to talk about Nancy the comic strip, which as you may know has experienced an extraordinary revival in the last year and a bit (?) under the direction of a woman whose name we don't know (but we do accept it's a woman, for some reason) pseudonymously called 'Olivia Jaimes'.

Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy (I made quite a few contributions to this wikipedia entry, not about Nancy but about Bushmiller, which I was fairly pleased with, that's what I'm like) was, as Jaimes has sussed, a greedy and self-centred, if benign, little child whose femaleness was reasonably irrelevant (in the sense that she wasn't girly). Did I get that right? I mean, she was greedy and self-centred, but that it was only in that low-key way that most children are. She was a creative problem solver, for herself and others, but only insofar as the solving meant some kind of quirky labour-saving or unexpected reuse, etc.* It was actually when it comes down to it all about the gag, although to his credit Bushmiller seems to have kept the simple character traits of Nancy in place for decades. The wikipedia entry satisfactorily conveys his approach I think.

What intrigued me was what happened after Bushmiller died, particularly in the Guy (and Brad) Gilchrist years prior to Jaimes coming on board, where the Nancy strips just got cheesier and cheesier and Aunt Mitzi just got bustier and bustier, and it all ends up being like some kind of alien misreading of Americana (or an all-too-true reading, I don't know anymore). Going to the Nancy site and hitting 'random' will quickly get you to some of these. I did it just then and got to this from 1998:

I won't even bother showing you the 'gag' in this strip because there basically isn't one.

Anyway I'm not here to demonise Guy Gilchrist I'm just more interested in, a la Mickey Mouse or Elton John, how a property/product loses its defining or interesting features over time, and becomes a kind of cipher that people just want to have around, without really caring what else they might get out of it. The cultural version of comfort food I suppose.

So hats off to whoever decided to bring 'Olivia Jaimes' on board for the post-Gilchrist Nancy because it has gone from being a dull anachronism to the funniest daily comic strip in the mainstream now, by far. Not only is it in itself brilliant, the characters - all the new supporting characters Jaimes has brought in, teachers and friends and enemies etc - are (I don't think I'm reading too much into this, maybe I am) a billion times more rounded than most comic strip casts, and that even (no definitely) goes for Aunt Fritzi, who is actually now, like, a person.

I also love Jaimes' ability to cap a decent enough joke (in this case, that Sluggo's musical notes turn into Zs - that's Bushmilleresque) with an actually really funny last frame, that shows once again how self-centred Nancy is, but for some reason it's ok because she's just clueless about it. She's closer to one of Sarah Silverman's typifications of herself (obviously not SS herself) in that regard than she is to the original Bushmiller Nancy, let alone the kewpie troll of the Gilchrist era.** I'm lovin' it.

*Exception is I suppose that Sluggo is her boyfriend and she has a lot of fears and tribulations when it comes to maintaining that relationship. I can't really go there. I don't think they're sleeping together.

** I am probably being too hard on the Gilchrists, some of their stuff was OK, but it just comes across as OK despite themselves, not because they were trying to be great. Does that make sense? Maybe not. The poignancy of this frame explains what I mean:

thought bubble

I have a lot of things to say about misappropriation, just generally, but also about misdesignation, which is not a word, of important everyday symbols or devices which are intended to communicate something but end up communicating something else entirely when misused.

So can I just say 'thought bubble', which is usually used to suggest 'a small ill-formed or unformed or pre-formed idea which may or may not develop into something more robust' is a misappropriation of the reality of the thought bubble in comics which is basically a thought cloud - it sits above the character's head and only they know what's in it but essentially it's silent and personal. A thought bubble is what you're thinking, like Nancy's thought above. It's a done deal. You can't pop it, it won't burst under pressure. I don't like this misuse of 'thought bubble'.

Don't even start me on 'brain fart'. Please, ugh.

a bit from my forthcoming CJ Degaris book which I am about to delete

I don't know if it's good or bad or it just is. This is how I write though, now - I work it out on the page.

The health-giving properties of sunlight were renowned and in a period when the 1918 influenza pandemic was wracking the world, the notion of sunlight as ‘nature’s disinfectant’ had taken hold. It was a stretch to imagine that drying fruit in the sun was somehow not only a hygienic process but also a process by which the health-giving properties of sunlight entered the food, but the association was in many ways enough. Under analysis ‘Sunraysia’ comes apart pretty quickly; it might even be some kind of knock at ‘Asia’ (but then, twenty years later no-one thought that about Fantasia).

I know this isn't particularly great writing. In many ways I'm getting worse... I am losing track of how to spell homonyms, for instance. I don't blame spellcheck so much as email, where you write stuff to people but it's really like you're thinking or saying it, so you're (well, I'm) 'hearing it in your [my] head'. 

I am sure the 'aysia' in 'Sunraysia' has fuck all to do with asia though. Once you express a thought bubble like that, you can dismiss it.* 

By the way: thought bubbles. Hmm.

* Update: Unless the past doesn't let you. A few months after writing the above I found a critique of the word 'Sunraysia' by DeGaris' enemies suggesting that it was unAustralian for sounding too much like the demonised 'Asia'! People are so creative. 

My Friend Mr Leakey

(Yesterday) I just finished reading My Friend Mr Leakey or at least the first three stories in the book which are about Mr. Leakey. I'll save the other stories for another time. I can't read a bunch of short stories in a row because I get confused, it feels like that segment in Spicks and Specks where they make you sing instructions from a gardening book to the tune of 'Friday on my Mind'.

The reason I wanted to reread was that when I gained these cats and decided I wanted to keep one of them, from somewhere in the depths of my mind I thought he should probably be called Pompey, after Mr. Leakey's slightly naughty dragon. Actually, Pompey the cat is not particularly naughty (his brother Chanticleer is very naughty) but quite reclusive and shy, though since he got out of the house a week ago and had a lost weekend (in rain and cold) from Friday-Monday he has also become quite affectionate, or whatever I interpret as affectionate. Wants to be patted. Which I suppose is less affectionate and more affection-receptive. Anyway, Pompey the dragon lives in the fireplace and has to always been intensely hot, I think the most text devoted to him is when he goes awol in a volcano. He is sort of like a naughty, dangerous dog.

As a child I somehow knew that J. B. S. Haldane was not an ordinary children's book author, but I didn't know anything about him really, and the wikipedia entry above actually makes me interested enough to want to possibly think about reading a biography. I enjoy this kind of figure. But before I do that I have to fix the stupid structure of the actual wikipedia entry which is foolishly ad hoc.

For one second

I'm a great example of how easy it is to inhibit a technology user with the simplest of impediments. I think I mentioned previously how totes much of a drag it is getting in to update this blog because it's associated with an old email address I recklessly abandoned a few years ago. I never wanted to be the kind of person (i.e. practically everyone on earth) who abandoned their blog, and I am pretty sure I'd be much more of an updater if I didn't have to go through this two-minute rigmarole of getting from one preset gmail scenario to another. The previous post, by the way, was scheduled five or more years ago and would have shown up whatever happened.

So look it's super easy and also stupid to say 'I vow to henceforth update frequently' because that's meaningless but I miss blogging, indeed, the main thing I hate about blogging is, I still hate the word blog/blogging but that's OK really. I am somewhat freed by the fact that no-one on earth reads this shit now (there might be one or two people who have alerts scheduled who will be surprised to find I have posted this, and also, have to remember 'who' I 'am'). If I don't post again in the near future let me just update you to a situation of no real change: still living in Albion, not liking it that much, got a lot of work on, got at least one (co-edited) book coming out this year, another one (sole-authored) on track for next year, going overseas next month for five weeks, that in particular is cause enough to blog right. I'm not that excited about the o/s trip at this point but at least I don't have that stupid feeling I used to have of 'I have so much to do in Melbourne, I can't leave, what a drag' though that feeling still has a month or so to appear. We'll see.