One book can be an aberration, two is a trend - three is at least a career phase, especially in a field so time-intensive as cartooning. Interestingly, there's stylistic tics and storytelling choices in those books that echo what he's done in the long-running Zippy comics - most obviously the use of his own avatar, "Griffy," as a viewpoint and narrator in the story itself, the person telling us this story.
Bill Griffith came to Three Rocks - which has the somewhat cumbersome double-barreled subtitle The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, The Man Who Created Nancy - a decade into this new phase of his work, with habits of research and organization already established. This is a more conventional biography than either Invisible Ink, the story of one aspect of a life, or Nobody's Fool, which was hampered by a lack of serious records about "Surtees" and any way into the mind of his subject. Ernie Bushmiller created a body of work, lived fully in the world, and talked about his work regularly, both in published materials and to people who were still alive for Griffith to interview.
Griffith has long been a fan of Bushmiller's work, particularly focused on the simple clarity of Bushmiller's lines and gags, how he made cartoons (as others have said) that's it's almost impossible to not read and get immediately. So readers might wonder how he goes about recreating Bushmiller's characters and scenes - but the surprising answer, buried in the backmatter, is that he didn't.
As it says on the very last page of the book: "All drawings of Nancy, Sluggo, Fritzi Ritz, and/or any other creation of Ernie Bushmiller in this book are drawn by Bushmiller and have not been drawn by the author." In an odd way, Three Rocks is a posthumous collaboration between Bushmiller and Griffith, with Griffith recontextualizing hundreds of Bushmiller drawings to tell this long story of their creator's life and work. Griffith doesn't talk about tools, but I suspect he used Photoshop (or a similar program) to extract the figures he needed, clean up any visual artifacts, replace lettering, and collage those figures into his own pages - or into the many mostly-Bushmiller pages here, since Griffith also uses Bushmiller backgrounds and objects, particularly on pages where Nancy comments on her creator.
It's a bit post-modern, but Nancy was always playing with forms and art itself - from a middle-brow stance, of course, and all in service of a good gag - so it's appropriate, and there are a lot of somewhat surreal Nancy images for Griffith to work from. For example: that cover. The Nancy is Bushmiller, but the cross-hatching on the rocks looks like Griffith, so I think the rest of the cover is his work.
Bushmiller's life wasn't particularly exciting: he went to work at the New York World as a copy boy at the age of fourteen, and his whole career flowed from that. He never jumped syndicates or papers, and he did the Fritzi Ritz strip - later retitled Nancy, after the character he added to it - from 1925 through his death in 1982. Griffith tells that story here, with digressions by Griffy and Bushmiller's own characters about the nature of art and humor, what makes a great "snapper" (the final panel that makes the joke work), and other related topics.
It's a fairly long and dense book, circling Bushmiller's life but, in the end, more about the impulse to create - and, in particular, to create something funny. Both Bushmiller and Griffith are and were masters of that. It's thought-provoking and funny itself - both in the full Bushmiller strips it reprints (many of them, mostly shot from old scrapbooks) and in Griffith's new work here.
No comments:
Post a Comment