U.S. #3000o
32¢ Nancy
Comic Strip Classics
Issue Date: October 1, 1995
City: Boca Rotan, FL
Quantity: 300,000,000
Printed By: Stamp Venturers
Printing Method: Photogravure
Perforations: 10.1
Color: Multicolored
Following the success of The Yellow Kid, and later Outcault’s popular Buster Brown, comic strips with child stars became a regular feature in the funny pages. In 1925 Ernie Bushmiller, a young artist for the New York World, took over the comic created several years earlier by Larry Whitington. The strip, Fritzi Ritz, was about a girl who gets a job as a movie actress. In 1933, Bushmiller introduced a new character – Fritzi’s kid niece, Nancy.
Although the little wire-haired girl began her career making occasional appearances in her aunt’s strip, by the end of the decade she had supplanted Fritzi as the main attraction. And in 1938, she and her boyfriend Sluggo became the stars of their own feature, which was renamed for its main character.
Admired by many of his fellow cartoonists, Bushmiller was seldom sophisticated in his humor. (Interestingly, Bushmiller also wrote slapstick gags for Harold Lloyd and other film comedians.) In fact, his strip Nancy was a masterpiece of simplicity in both artwork and gags, appealing to millions of readers. His ability to streamline his artwork and reduce humor to its simplest level, was an exercise which he affectionately termed “Dumb It Down.”