Nancy
By (Author) John Stanley
Drawn and Quarterly
Drawn and Quarterly
25th September 2009
Canada
Children
Fiction
741.5973
Hardback
128
Width 205mm, Height 285mm, Spine 20mm
814g
Created by Ernie Bushmiller, the beloved Brillo-headed Nancy starred in her own comic book series for years, written by arguably the greatest children's comics writer of all time, John Stanley. Most famous for scripting the adventures of Marjorie Henderson Buell's Little Lulu, John Stanley is one of comics' secret geniuses. He provided a visual rough draft for all the comics he wrote and then handed off these "scripts" for someone else to render the finished art. No matter what comic he was writing, he breathed life into his characters. In Stanley's comics, Nancy is no longer a crabby cipher but a hilarious, brilliant, scheming, duplicitous, honest, and loyal little kid-a real little kid. Her adventures with her best friend, the comically destitute Sluggo, involve moneymaking schemes to afford ice-cream sodas, botched trips to the corner store for Nancy's Aunt Fritzi, and comically raucous attempts to remove loose teeth. Drawn & Quarterly is launching several kid-friendly volumes of Nancy and Nancy and Sluggo as companion volumes to Melvin Monster and Dark Horse's Little Lulu volumes. The books are designed by Seth (The Complete Peanuts; Melvin Monster; Clyde Fans; It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken).
John Stanley (1914-93) was a journeyman comics scripter in the 1950s and 1960s. He is most famous for his scripts for most of the Little Lulu comics produced by Dell, and is considered by many comics historians to be the most consistently funny and idiosyncratic writer to ever work in comics. He left comics bitterly sometime in the late 1960s, never to return.