Bill Griffith has had a lifelong love of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy—as well as an equally long fascination with Ernie Bushmiller, Nancy’s creator. Griffith has channeled his passion for Nancy and Bushmiller into his new book, Three Rocks, a graphic biography of Bushmiller that charts his rise from a poor kid from the Bronx to a wealthy cartoonist who hobnobbed with celebrities and resided in an affluent, leafy suburb in Connecticut. But Three Rocks is more than a straightforward biography: it’s also an argument for Nancy as Art, a body of work to be taken seriously, and an explanation for why she has achieved lasting status as a pop-culture icon (like her accomplice Sluggo, whose presence looms large in Three Rocks). Hogan’s Alley editor Tom Heintjes recently spoke with Griffith about his book. (Throughout the interview, click an image to enlarge it.)

Tom Heintjes: You’ve been fascinated by—it sounds nicer than “obsessed with”—Ernie Bushmiller for decades. What made you decide to undertake a biography of him now?

Bill Griffith: This was percolating in my mind for years—decades, really. I was always curious about the man who created Nancy, the strip I loved more than Peanuts, Krazy Kat or Little Nemo. I assumed he was one of the "gum chewers" he referred to as the typical comics reader, but I had very little to go on.

It's funny, I started Three Rocks just before How to Read Nancy by Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik came out. It added to the impetus to get working on a full-scale bio. Then, when Brian Walker told me Ernie's friend and right-hand man, Jim Carlsson, was alive and well and living just an hour and a half away from me in Connecticut, I gave him a call. He was amazingly generous with me, providing the kind of real-life detail only he could.·I found out Ernie was a well-read appreciator of Fats Waller and S.J. Perelman! No dumbing down there!

TH: Obviously, you were pretty well versed in all things Bushmiller before you undertook Three Rocks. In the course of researching the book, did you learn anything about him that surprised even you?

BG: When Jim Carlsson told me Ernie's favorite artist was Diego Velasquez, I knew I was dealing with a complicated man. Ernie may have picked up an interest in "high culture" from his erudite father, who also gave him the idea he could entertain people with his ability to draw and tell jokes. The biggest surprise was that Ernie was, for a brief time during his art school days, friends with my favorite painter, Reginald Marsh. They haunted burlesque houses together in the 1920s, sketching the strippers from the balcony. Biography gold!

Gallery: A (Very) Few Examples of Nancy’s Appearances in Griffith’s “Zippy the Pinhead”

TH: How long did it take you to produce the book once you set out? As you said, it been percolating in your mind for years before you began work on it.

BG: Two and a half years. A little quicker than my Schlitzie book [Nobody’s Fool], due partly to the fact the I included a number of pages of Nancy strips, which I felt was necessary for people who might not be as familiar with the strip as fans like myself are. I chose strips that were either iconic or a little surreal, words that nicely describe Nancy herself.

TH: All researchers have those wonderful “eureka” moments. Were there events that you considered breakthroughs?

BG: Big and small breakthroughs. Big: finding out Ernie's "favorite things" from Jim Carlsson [page 193 in the book]. You can learn a lot from someone's "likes." All of Ernie's added up to a window into who he was. We're all somewhat defined by our "favorite things." Ernie's were a surprising revelation.

Small: He invested in the stock market with his considerable wealth. But the only stock he really followed was the Tootsie Roll Company. I checked. It's still a privately held company. Funny and a little weird—but fitting. Sluggo would approve.

Another one: on periodic vacations to his cartoonist friend Harry Haenigsen's farm in rural New Jersey, while the others played croquet and went horse riding, Ernie spent his time in the hay loft, working on strip ideas. A man after my own heart.

TH: Conversely, we all hit dead ends in our research, always frustrating. Were there questions you had going in that you were unable to answer?

BG: There was a rumor that Ernie met George Herriman in 1931, when he was in Los Angeles working on gags for Harold Lloyd. I couldn't confirm this after diligent Googling and phone calls, so I decided it was too good to not be true and I included the imagined meeting in the book. Once I crossed that line, it was only natural to imagine a jam Sunday page Ernie could have done with Herriman, "Fritzi and Krazy."

TH: Ernie was a paradox in some ways. Perhaps many ways. He rubbed shoulders with celebrities and intellectuals whose work was renowned worldwide, yet he saw himself as not worthy of great scrutiny. Obviously, you disagree. And while he generally avoided talking about himself, in your view, was he humble? Egotistical? Or maybe just in disbelief that a poor kid from the Bronx had arrived at this station in life?

BG: Jim Carlsson said Ernie told him he "preferred to bathe in the shade of anonymity." I think he was genuinely humble. He hated giving interviews. That tells you a lot. At the same time, I think he was a little insecure about his talent and success, having never graduated high school and becoming friends with people whose education was greater. He would not have been accessible to fans in our social media age.

TH: Speaking of celebrities, you show Ernie and his wife, Abby, socializing with Groucho Marx. Did Groucho actually hit on Abby? He was not subtle about being a wolf in your book.

BG: Once again, Jim heard this from Ernie and passed it on to me. Harold Lloyd was known to host weekly dinners with movie people at the Brown Derby restaurant. Since Ernie was working for him at this time, he invited him and Abby to a series of these get-togethers. Jim said Ernie told him he would probably have spent more time in L.A. if it wasn't for Groucho's lechery. So yes, Groucho hit on Abby, right in front of Ernie. He got away with this for the most part—it was his screen persona. But here was another insight into Ernie—he respected Abby first and foremost. If Abby wanted to put an end to Groucho's act by going back to the Bronx, Ernie agreed. Jim told me Ernie and Abby were so close, they would finish each other’s sentences.

TH: In your view, how autobiographical were the characters of Phil Fumble and Fritzi Ritz? I’ve heard Abby described as strong willed and domineering, and I’ve wondered if that dynamic bled through to his work. After all, Fritzi was always muscling Phil around. And Phil way outkicked his coverage.

BG: Fritzi was an inherited character for Ernie. She was a kind of "flapper" character for cartoonist Larry Whittington when Whittington quit the strip and Ernie took over—at the tender age of nineteen!—in 1925. Ernie's then girlfriend, Abby, was a small influence on the way he drew Fritzi, but she bore no resemblance to Fritz's somewhat air-headed personality. On the other hand, comparisons between Ernie and Phil Fumble are obvious. But, once again—only in looks, not personality. When Ernie was drawing Phil in the early 1930s, he had a successful cartooning career and was happily in love with Abby, whom he married in 1930. Phil was a hapless bumbler—Ernie was a "man about town," regularly appearing, with Abby, in tabloid newspaper gossip columns.

TH: After publication of a Nancy strip involving vanilla extract, Ernie received many bottles of vanilla extract as a thank you from McCormick, the company that produced vanilla extract, a testament to the strip’s popularity—even though he didn’t mention McCormick by name. This actually happened? I admit that, knowing how expensive vanilla extract is, I thought that was a tremendous windfall in itself. McCormick, if you’re reading this…

BG: It really happened. Once again, thanks to Jim Carlsson and his steel-trap memory. A few similar things happened to me a few decades ago. I did a Zippy strip in which Zippy chugs some Snapple, washing it down with a few Ding Dongs. Several weeks later, a truck pulled up to my house in San Francisco and five cases of Snapple, and a thank-you note from the company, were hauled in. On another occasion, I had Zippy wearing a fictional tuxedo made out of Polar Tech fleece. A big box of Polar Tech sweaters, gloves and scarves arrived a little later. Alas, no tuxedo.

When I tried the routine again, with Zippy driving a Lamborghini, no dice.

TH: Did Ernie Bushmiller teach you anything about being a cartoonist? Not necessarily in terms of executing the work—or maybe in terms of executing the work—but his notion of simply treating it as a job to be done, or anything else about how you approach your own career in cartooning?

BG: Ernie and I both produced/produce seven strips a week for daily newspaper syndication, but I think the analogy ends there. The only thing I can say Zippy and Nancy have in common is "breaking the fourth wall" fairly regularly and playing with the concept of the form. Zippy regularly strolls into meta-land, where he meets other cartoon characters, including, on quite a few occasions, Nancy herself, and, of course, those mystical, iconic Three Rocks. Peanuts may tell you what it's like to be a child. Nancy tells you what it's like to be a comic strip.

TH: You discuss Ernie’s singular focus on generating gags—for example, how he worked backwards from the last panel—the “snapper,” in his parlance. You mention that he kept a toilet plunger nearby to spark his thinking about gags. But you don’t mention him leafing through the Sears catalogue in search of gag ideas, which is something I’ve always heard. Is that catalogue thing an urban legend about Bushmiller’s work? If so, I have some atoning to do for spreading a falsehood.

BG: You missed the Sears catalog mention on page 10 of the book. In one of his rare audio interviews, for a show hosted by Fred Waring in the forties, Ernie said, of his back-to-front- technique, "But I know a guy who draws his cartoons upside down, so I don't worry about it." I assume he was kidding.

TH: In Three Rocks, you comment on the sophisticated, scholarly analysis of Nancy that began decades and decades ago, and you present some insightful analysis of your own. How do you think Ernie would have responded to that sort of analysis of his work? Would he have scoffed at it? Appreciated it? Or just retreated to his studio to work?

BG: From what I've learned, Ernie took the deep-dish appreciation of Nancy as a form of flattery. And if the Nancy haters were left scratching their heads because of it, he liked that even more. You always have to remember that Ernie was a pretty sophisticated guy, even if he never graduated high school.

TH: You obviously had a lot of fun recreating Bushmiller strips, and also creating strips from scratch, like your marvelous mash-up of Fritzi Ritz and Krazy Kat. In recreating examples of Ernie’s work for Three Rocks, did you learn anything new about his work that you didn’t already pick up on? After all, you’ve been riffing on his work for many years.

BG: Working with Nancy art to create repurposed mash-ups gave me an even deeper appreciation of Ernie's art. Each one of his individual images—Nancy, Sluggo, other characters, sidewalks, storefronts, lawns, trees, buildings—all fit into each other like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. You can take one out and paste it into a different location and it all still looks on purpose, in a new jigsaw puzzle, as if Ernie did it, not me. The graphic strength of each image is so firm, they can even be placed in a newly created non-Nancy composition, and it still looks like it was meant to be there. Some detractors used to accuse Ernie of using rubber-stamp images of his characters, simply stamping them in to the panels. I would agree, but not as a criticism, more as a compliment.

TH: You depict a chance meeting between Bushmiller and Lawrence Lariar, a cartoonist with whom you have a unique connection that you explored in your book Invisible Ink. How did you become aware of that incidental, almost accidental, encounter?

BG: Poetic license. I knew that Lariar tried four times to get a daily strip going, and I knew he frequented the Inkwell Bar, where he might have run into Ernie, so I improvised. After all, I knew a lot about Lariar from my Invisible Ink research, and now I had a lot to go on regarding Ernie's personality, so I got creative.

TH: Making the acquaintance of Jim Carlsson, Bushmiller’s close friend and neighbor, was obviously enormously helpful to you. How did you get in touch with him and persuade him to share his reminiscences and insights? How different would Three Rocks be without Carlsson’s presence and involvement?

BG: I met Jim years ago at a meeting of the NCS Connecticut chapter, where I gave a talk on Zippy. Then later, when the idea of doing Three Rocks was percolating, around 2018, I called Brian Walker and he gave me Jim's number. Jim was amazingly generous with me. We had a bunch of in-depth conversations at his place in Stamford. Without Jim, my book would just be a recitation of facts, most of them already familiar. He opened a window on "the man behind Nancy" that no one else could have provided. Jim was more than an assistant to Ernie—they were close friends. There was very little persuading involved. Jim said he thought my book was the "third act" about Ernie he'd been waiting for. Act one was Brian Walker's Best of Nancy book. Act two was Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik's How to Read Nancy, and I walked in with act three, appropriately titled Three Rocks.

TH: Your book, apart from a biography of Ernie Bushmiller, is an impressive discussion of Why Nancy Matters. You discuss the artistic value of appreciating work that is often minimized or outright dismissed, and you’ve made this case for years. Did Three Rocks lead you to make these arguments in a way that you hadn’t before? After all of your research for the book, did it crystallize your thinking about Bushmiller’s place in the artistic pantheon in a new way?

BG: Now that I have a working knowledge of Bushmiller the man, my appreciation for what he accomplished is definitely more nuanced. But at the heart of Nancy lies a great mystery. I don't mean to sound evasive, but Nancy is the kind of thing that, the more you examine it, the more it escapes examination. This quality, I think, is true for all works of creative genius. When people ask me to explain the idea of Three Rocks, I'm tempted to say it's a Zen thing. And as in Zen practice, if you seek to understand something, you're on the wrong path. Nancy just is. Ernie instinctively knew that to explain Nancy is a fool's errand. Like Herriman's Krazy Kat, Nancy has such an intense presence, she has a life of her own. As Zippy said in a strip I did a number of years ago, "It's Nancy and Sluggo's world—we just question reality in it!"

TH: This is a hypothetical question, so there’s no real way to answer it…but I’ll ask it anyway. So many things had to happen for Bushmiller’s career to develop as it did. Larry Whittington had to create Fritzi Ritz and then leave it for another job. Bushmiller had to be tapped to take the strip over, and then he introduced Nancy, then Sluggo, and the rest is history. If Whittington had not left Fritzi Ritz, do you think Bushmiller’s drive was so strong that he would have found his way otherwise? In other words, was Nancy inevitable?

BG: Life is a series of accidents. And like Woody Allen said, it's all about showing up for appointments. Bushmiller was just at the right place and the right time when Fritzi was handed to him in 1925. He had the sense to accept it, no questions asked. Never look a gift comic strip in the mouth!

Zippy became a weekly strip in 1975 because someone at the Berkeley Barb asked me if I'd like to add Zippy to their comics page. To sweeten the deal, they offered me color—one color, red, to be exact. I didn't ask for it. But it was an "appointment," and I took it. Years later, in 1986, King Features asked if I'd like them to "take Zippy national." Once again, an appointment. Freelancers, which describes most cartoonists, ride the bubble. You never know when it will pop and where you'll land.

So, no—without the fortuitous events that led Ernie to Fritzi and then Nancy, there would be no Nancy. On the other hand, given Bushmiller's feel for comics, something else would have materialized. It just wouldn't have a spiky hairdo.

TH: If you had the chance to talk to Bushmiller, what would you ask him? What are the great unanswered questions in your mind?

BG: Frankly, I'd ask him how he spent his weekly income. It had to amount to at least $10,000 a week in the later years, since Nancy was in over 800 papers. I know it's nosey of me, but I can't help wondering. I know he left significant amounts to various charities in his, and Abby's, will, but I can't find any evidence that he threw money around. Could it all have gone to Tootsie Roll stock?

TH: I know you’re on to your next project. What’s next after Three Rocks?

BG: I'm about halfway into my next book, Photographic Memory, a graphic biography of my great-grandfather, pioneer photographer William Henry Jackson. The photographs he took of the Yellowstone area in 1871 convinced Congress to declare it the first national park. He lived to be 99, dying in 1942. Every decade was jammed with drama and adventure.

You can preorder Three Rocks (whose publication date is August 29) from Amazon or, better yet, order a copy through your local independent bookseller or comics shop.