Nancy: Volume One (John Stanley Library) [Hardcover]

John Stanley (Author), Seth (Designer)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2009

Classic comics from the writer of Melvin Monster

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).

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 5 Up–Nancy and her pal Sluggo were popular characters in the mid-20th century, and this volume collects their escapades from the years 1957-1958. Designed by the critically acclaimed comics creator Seth, this full-color collection is beautifully packaged with a hardcover binding and heavy, tan-colored pages. These facts, along with certain elements of the content, make this book more likely to appeal to comics collectors and Nancy fans than to contemporary kids. Certainly her high jinks will still entertain, but, like many children's classics, changing social mores and customs, such as the fact that much of the humor stems from Sluggo's extreme poverty and resulting lack of education, mean that it will not have the same appeal it once did, and will leave some parents frowning. In the end, this is an elegant collection, lovingly assembled, that may find new fans but will more likely please the old ones.–Douglas P. Davey, Halton Hills Public Library, Ontario, Canada
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From Booklist

In 1957, as Stanley was ending his long run writing Little Lulu, he began work on the comic-book incarnation of an even better-known moppet, the star of Ernie Bushmiller’s newspaper strip, Nancy. In Stanley’s hands, Nancy—little more than a joke-delivery device for Bushmiller—becomes a feisty lass much like Lulu. The supporting characters also have analogues in Lulu. Sluggo is a slender but poor Tubby, pesky neighbor kid Pee Wee is Nancy’s Alvin, and the bully Spike is a one-boy West Side Gang. Stanley’s Nancy lacks the appeal of his Lulu, though, largely because of Gormley’s pedestrian art (which does, however, evoke Bushmiller’s brutally unadorned approach). It’s not surprising that the liveliest stories involve a new character Stanley created, the eerie protogoth Oona Goosepimple, who lives in a haunted house with her Addams Family–like clan. Stanley’s Nancy isn’t as lively as the original comic books he’d soon create for Dell Comics (e.g., Melvin Monster), but what it lacks in cartooning verve it partially makes up for in quiet charm. --Gordon Flagg

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 152 pages
• Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly (September 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 189729977X
• ISBN-13: 978-1897299777
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 7.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #879,362 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fritzi Ritz Revisited, September 18, 2009

By 

Gord Wilson "alivingdog.com" (Bellingham, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Nancy: Volume One (John Stanley Library) (Hardcover)

Comic book fans got a taste of things to come when Drawn and Quarterly released a 32 page Melvin Monster/ Nancy combo comic on Free Comic Book Day. Melvin materialized as the first volume in the John Stanley Library, and here's Nancy as the second. Melvin was entirely a Stanley creation, but Nancy's creator was Ernie Bushmiller. Nancy also began life in the newspaper comic, Fritzi Ritz, in the early '30s, graduating to her own strip in 1938. She went on to become one of the best-loved comic strips in history.

Nancy began appearing in St. John comics in 1955, and had her own Dell title by 1957. John Stanley, the brilliant cartoonist, writer, and storyboard artist of all things Dell, handled the title there, and thus this volume's inclusion in this series. Nancy: Volume One reprints the Nancy stories from the first five Dell titles, #146-150, from 1957-58. As with the Melvin Monster volume, Melvin Monster: Volume One (John Stanley Library) this is a beautiful hardback designed by Seth, known for Fantagraphics Complete Peanuts editions. There are about 150 pages of full color comics, printed on quality paper, but with a slightly worn and aged look.

The only cavil is why aren't the original covers included? Most of these covers are so evocative, one could stare at them all day, as with Irving Tripp's covers for Little Lulu, which were included in the Dark Horse Little Lulu paperback reprints. The covers may not be absolutely necessary in the case of Nancy, but when you get to the third volume, Thirteen Going on Eighteen, Thirteen Going on Eighteen: The John Stanley Library the lack of these covers, composed as they are, of masterfully drawn single panel jokes, is a great loss indeed.

One reason Nancy gained such popularity in the funnies is that Ernie Bushmiller was a master of the daily three or four panel strip. His uncluttered style exactly suited his simple subject matter; one never tired of reading Nancy, and it was the first thing I'd turn to in the daily comics. To make of Nancy one more young heroine off on adventures in the world, or to involve her in long plot lines in the comic books, would be to more or less neutralize her impact. As these comics show, Stanley did something much more clever. While the story may run around five pages, the panels are made up of mini- visual slapstick frames which resolve every few panels, almost like a daily strip within a Sunday comic.

Stanley tended to have carte blanche as it were with his characters in the comics, and introduced a gentle fantasy element. Nancy's friend, Oona, in this comic, somewhat suggests Little Itch in the Little Lulu stories. He introduces great new characters, like Bill Bungle, Burglar, and Bill Bumble, who seems to nearly be the same character. Both names show Stanley's love of alliteration.

If these volumes had the covers, they would definitely rate a five. As it is, they prove a long overdue tribute to Stanley, and will be read and reread by collectors who keep their pristine copies sealed and filed away. For the rest of us, they're a great way to revisit the wonderful days of Dell.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stanley tries his hand at Bushmiller's creations, October 9, 2009

By 

Christopher Barat (Owings Mills, MD, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nancy: Volume One (John Stanley Library) (Hardcover)

To start on an ominous note: a number of people appear to have the wrong idea about the issue numbers and dates for this volume. The title page says that the book contains stories from Dell NANCY #146-150 (1957-58). In searching out appropriate screen grabs for the blog post, however, I found an electronic copy of the first story, "Oona Goosepimple," complete with original Dell indicia -- and, guess what, it first appeared in NANCY #162 (April 1959). Wikipedia, and the estimable Don Markstein, come closer than D&Q, but they miss the target as well, with each citing NANCY #166 as the site of Oona's debut. So both the Internet and the "dead tree peddlers" struck out in this case.

Actually, the first appearance of the Wednesday Addams-like Oona highlights an important point about Stanley's approach to Ernie Bushmiller's characters. Having pretty much burned out on LITTLE LULU, Stanley was probably delighted to put a new set of "Lulu-esque" characters through their paces. The fact that Nancy, Sluggo, and company were well-established figures in a popular, long-running comic strip, however, must have given the creator some pause. Lulu, who began her career as a pantomime character in gag cartoons, had had plenty of room for development when Stanley began to flesh out her neighborhood. Nancy and Sluggo may have had shallow, uninspired personalities, but Stanley must have felt that he needed to hew to them, at least for a while, as he settled down to his task. One can therefore regard the eccentric Oona's appearance as something of a "sowing of the wind" with an eye towards reaping a later "whirlwind" of story possibilities. The rest of the early stories in this collection are fairly unremarkable, making Oona -- a black-clad girl with beady eyes who gives everyone around her a case of nerves and lives in a spooky house with a surprise (usually of the nasty variety) around every corner -- stand out all the more starkly.

Once Stanley gets his feet under him, he begins to pull Nancy and Sluggo in directions the unimaginative Bushmiller would never have contemplated (though Dan Gormley's art, if a bit more unpredictable than Bushmiller's, does give the comics the same stodgy look as the comic strip). You can see it coming when Stanley devotes an entire one-page gag to sending up Liberace in the person of "La Plunke," an impresario with a rhinestone-studded piano. For panel after panel, Nancy makes bitchy comments about La Plunke's talents, or lack thereof, climaxing by claiming that La Plunke, and not his piano, should be "hung" when she sees the latter getting lowered out of the stage door. Nancy's remarks scandalize her Aunt Fritzi a bit, which seems only right, as Nancy's relationship with her aunt is a lot more abrasive than Lulu's with her parents. Perhaps Stanley thought that Fritzi's not being Nancy's mother gave him a bit more leeway. Likewise, after treating Sluggo as a generic boy character in earlier stories, Stanley takes Bushmiller's notion of Sluggo as a "dead-end kid" and runs with it. In "Lower Education," Nancy forces Sluggo to go to school but thinks better of it after Sluggo starts fantasizing about using his education to become President. She ultimately convinces the janitor to keep Sluggo in the basement and have him sweep floors. Tubby may have played hooky on occasion, but the existence of parental figures in the LITTLE LULU "universe" wouldn't have allowed for this sort of a cynical resolution.

Stanley's innovations in handling the NANCY characters didn't prevent him from borrowing liberally from the LULU "template." Rich kid Rollo Haveall is basically Wilbur van Snobbe, take two, while the crook Bill Bungle (aka Bill Bungler, aka Bill Bumble -- perhaps Bill's incompetence was catching) reflects Stanley's apparent delight in using an adult figure who is hopelessly inept at his supposed specialty, a la the truant officer Mr. McNabbem in the LULU stories. If the NANCY stories -- even at their best -- fall a little short of the quality of the LULU oeuvre, then one reason may be the lack of a strong "bench" of supporting players. In the stories collected here, at least, Nancy has no "girl sidekick" to compare with Lulu's Annie; eager though Oona is to make friends and do things with Nancy, she's essentially a walk-on oddball. Likewise, the annoying neighbor kid Pee Wee isn't nearly as memorable (or annoying) as Alvin of "Story Telling Time" fame. Given the raw materials that he had to work with, however, Stanley's NANCY tales are unexpectedly fun and entertaining.

The last page of this volume has a picture of John Stanley (in the company of his editor Oscar LeBeck, Dan Gormley, and other worthies at Western's New York office) and a brief biography -- which just happens to be the same one that appeared at the end of the earlier MELVIN MONSTER collection. What this Library really needs is a volume-by-volume, bit-by-bit biography of Stanley in the manner of the articles that appeared in Another Rainbow's LITTLE LULU LIBRARY. As long as Fantagraphics keeps reprinting the same two-page Charles Schulz bio in THE COMPLETE PEANUTS, though, I suppose it would be somewhat hypocritical of me to complain about D&Q dropping the ball.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars WHERE ARE THE ORIGINAL COVERS???, October 9, 2009

By 

Luis - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Nancy: Volume One (John Stanley Library) (Hardcover)

Beautiful hardcover edition. All pages are fullcollor perfect reproductions of the great originals. But once again, WHERE ARE THE ORIGINAL COVERS??? Someone at Drawn and Quarterly is messing up all this John Stanley collection. So please, in the next volumes, PLEASE, DON'T FORGET TO INCLUDE THE ORIGINAL COVERS!!! PLEASE!