Nancy is an American comic strip, originally written and drawn by Ernie Bushmiller and distributed by United Feature Syndicate and Andrews McMeel Syndication. It was spun off from Fritzi Ritz, a strip Bushmiller inherited from creator Larry Whittington in 1925. After Fritzi's niece Nancy was introduced in 1933, Fritzi Ritz evolved to focus more and more on Nancy instead of Fritzi. The new strip took the old one's daily slot, while Fritzi Ritz continued as a Sunday, with Nancy taking the Sunday slot previously filled by Bushmiller's Phil Fumble strip beginning on October 30, 1938. History 1922 to 1982 The character of Nancy, a precocious eight-year-old, first appeared in the strip Fritzi Ritz, a comic about a professional actress and her family and friends. Larry Whittington began Fritzi Ritz in 1922, and it was taken over by Bushmiller three years later. On January 2, 1933, Bushmiller introduced Fritzi's niece, Nancy. In 1949, he was quoted as saying that he originally intended Nancy "just as an incidental character and I planned to keep her for about a week and then dump her... But the little dickens was soon stealing the show and Bushmiller, the ingrate, was taking all the bows." Nancy became the focus of the daily strip, which was renamed for her in 1938 after Lawrence W. Hager, editor of the Owensboro, Kentucky Inquirer-Messenger (now the Messenger-Inquirer), lobbied for the change; Sluggo Smith, Nancy's friend from the "wrong side of the tracks" had been introduced earlier that year, and the strip's popularity rose. Fritzi Ritz became a secondary character, although her solo strip continued as a Sunday-only strip, and her relationship with Phil Fumble was an ongoing presence until his departure in 1968. Comics historian Don Markstein ascribed the strip's success to Bushmiller's "bold, clear art style, combined with his ability to construct a type of gag that appealed to a very broad audience. Fritzi Ritz continued as a Sunday feature until 1968. At its peak in the 1970s, Nancy ran in more than 880 newspapers, before falling to 79 shortly before Guy Gilchrist's departure from the strip in 2018. 1982 to 2018 The strip continued to be produced by different writers and artists. Mark Lasky briefly handled the daily strip in 1982/1983 until his death from cancer at age 29. Al Plastino worked on Sunday episodes of Nancy from 1982 to 1984 after Bushmiller died. During that period, David