How to Read Nancy is the best book ever written about comics. No question. Besides using a single 1959 Nancy strip to demonstrate all of the formal properties of the medium in an unprecedented fashion, Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden manage to take that same comic and map a huge artistic / professional /industrial/ historical story about comics. This story includes: How a gag might have a history unto itself; how a teenage apprentice could become a giant of the medium; how the damn comics were actually printed; how arbitrarily they could be published; and casual-seeming dives into cartoonists-gone-Hollywood, particular studio building, and even a now-obscure New York paper. I don't think there's another book that covers all of those facets, all of which are integral to the comics of the 20th century and few of which have been told. And Karasik and Newgarden do it with concision and, of course, wit. It's truly inspired. On a personal note, Paul Karasik was the first cartoonist I interviewed for publication (Ganzfeld 1) and Mark Newgarden maybe the first cartoonist I visited in New York. I interviewed them by email, and they answered in a single voice. Please visit the book's website for more info and a list of upcoming events.

You guys are nuts!

Yes.

You both have spent decades worshipping this strip. Are you done with Nancy now? Have you exhausted it for yourselves?

Well, we honestly thought our little side project would take a year or two to dispatch. We thought we knew the August 8, 1959 episode pretty well. Our original 1988 essay, which appeared in Brian Walker's The Best of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy, contained eight levels of deconstruction and after teaching it all these years we figured there might be a handful more we could squeeze out. Ten years later How to Read Nancy has just landed —with a grand total of forty-three discrete aspects of this damned that strip we have isolated and analyzed (plus a comprehensive biography, seventeen appendices, dozens of meticulously restored line art strips –but wait! There's more!). Yet, despite the myriad grueling efforts it has taken to produce this book (Dun't Esk!), we continue to be mesmerized by Nancy.

We still see fresh Bushmiller strips that we have never seen before and still find them amusing, impressive, occasionally jaw-dropping… and, yes, fresh.

We still use Nancy in the classroom (as we hope many comics curriculum instructors will do once they get a hold of the book) and find that our students, as often as not, become equally enchanted.

So, while we can barely stand to look too closely at the finished book yet (still afraid the new baby has an extra thumb) we will always adore Nancy.

You mention a few times that Nancy has not received the historical attention (or affection) it deserves. I wonder if that's because is so prosaic on the surface. What is it about the way comic-strip history has been written that you think kept out Nancy? Is part of your contention that the almighty gag is equal to, say, the emotional heft of Krazy Kat or Peanuts, or the grandeur of Little Nemo? I think the answer is yes, and I agree, but perhaps you can explain a bit.

Krazy Kat and Little Nemo resemble "Art." Peanuts resembles "Philosophy." Nancy resembles nothing more and nothing less than a comic strip (and a gag-driven, self-proclaimed "dumb" one at that), hence: easily dismissed from the canon.

The public's affection has always been there. Savvy critics such as Manny Farber certainly "got" Nancy at the time of its initial popularity, but the next wave (1960s–1990s) of "serious" comics historians tended to revile the strip, for a variety of reasons that reveal more about their agenda (and their generational bias), than the merits of the work. Nancy was simply a hard sell for anybody trying to get the middlebrow public to take comics "seriously" when, for whatever reason, that was the name of the game. This includes the heroic Bill Blackbeard who single-handedly archived complete runs of nearly every 20th century American comic strip of consequence except Nancy, so deep was his ambivalence. (Due to this sin of omission, as far as we know, there is no complete hardcopy run of this once–ubiquitous comic strip left on planet earth.)

Our choice of the late, great Jerry Lewis for a foreword was highly intentional, yet despite some obvious parallels, Ernie Bushmiller never had the contemporary equivalent of the French New Wave publicly championing his work. Lewis gave us a great compliment in saying that ours is "a book that was written with an infinite care rarely seen in today's world." This is how we feel