Book-A-Day 2010 # 153 (7/6) -- Nancy, Vol. 1 by John Stanley (and Dan Gormley)

I don't know if we're as passionate and bifurcated as sparkly-vampire readers, but when it comes to Nancy there's definitely Team Bushmiller and Team Stanley. I, of course, am firmly on Team Bushmiller, as all right-thinking comics aficionados must be -- how can comics get any more precise than Bushmiller's line, or more iconic than The Three Rocks, or more highly engineered than his too-simple-not-to-read gags? Bushmiller was the newspaper gag-a-day strip burned down to its essence: austere, immediate, perfect.

And, yes, sure, that guy John Stanley wrote some decent mid-century humor comic books with more-or-less the same characters,too. But the difference between the two is incredibly stark, to my mind: Bushmiller was an auteur in his field, crafting little Zen masterpieces of humor. Stanley was a decent writer of comics for kids, somewhat better than the run of the mill at the time but nowhere near the level of a Carl Barks or a Walt Kelly.

Close to a month ago, I read the two (to date) collections of Stanley's mid-'60s Melvin Monster comic -- my review of those will appear in the October issue of Realms of Fantasy, so I'll say the bare minimum about them here -- and wasn't overly impressed. But Drawn & Quarterly is in the middle of a big series reprinting Stanley's work, so I figured I should give him another chance, and took a look at this first volume reprinting his work on the Nancy comic book in the mid-'50s. (This book contains all of the stories from issues 146-150 of the series, from 1957-58, without covers but with the pages all reproduced age-faded, like we're reading them in Grandma's attic -- in the usual artsy-presentation-of-old-mass-market-material style.)

The stories here are gently humorous, in a typically '50s style -- there are burglars and eerie little girls, but all is tamed and ritualized into the comics equivalent of comfort food. It's all material designed to be inoffensive to Greatest Generation parents but still palatable to their Boomer kids, and it never reaches above that level: pleasant, inoffensive, mildly funny in the way that everything it is, it is mildly.

I still don't see why Stanley is worthy of such fancy, gorgeous reprint collections -- though they're priced very reasonably; this one is only $24.95 -- unless one assumes a serious line in Nancy nostalgia from Boomers. (Or, to be kinder, that Team Stanley have their own arguments for their guy's merits, and I'm blind to those arguments and merits.) If you like Nancy, and you prefer her in longer comic-book stories, this will be an excellent book. But if Bushmiller's Nancy is the one you like best, it won't quite stand up, in comparison.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: A Camp - Here Are Many Wild Animals
via FoxyTunes