There may be no better exhibit A in walking the line between high- and lowbrow art than the comic strip Nancy. With Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created 'Nancy', Bill Griffith--of Zippy the Pinhead fame--presents a biography in the form of a graphic novel that's as approachable, enticing, and weird as the Nancy cartoonist's own work is. Bushmiller (1905-1982), a working-class guy from the Bronx, dropped out of school at 14 and became a copyboy at the New York World. He went from doing illustrations for the Sunday World magazine to crafting his own comic in 1922, honing his skills until 1925, when he took over the strip Fritzi Ritz; it was later renamed Nancy to reflect the character's popularity. Introduced in 1933, Fritzi's spunky eight-year-old niece navigated the world with her sketchy-looking young friend, Sluggo. Griffith notes that "the strip survives to this day, Bushmiller-less."
Although Bushmiller drew with the cleanest of lines and set Nancy in an anodyne-looking suburb, he applies surreal touches that forbade complacent reading and courted an adult audience. In one of Bushmiller's comics reproduced here, Sluggo gives Nancy a "push" in her toy car by tilting down the cartoon panel she's occupying. Also included is a comic in which Nancy and Zippy the Pinhead discuss catchphrases. Of course, that strip was drawn by Griffith (Nobody's Fool: The Life and Times of Schlitzie the Pinhead), who injects Three Rocks with layers of meta that verge on the countless. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer