18 Facts About Ernie Bushmiller

Ernie Bushmiller's work is noted for its simple graphic style.

Ernie Bushmiller briefly attended Theodore Roosevelt High School before leaving at 14 to work as a copy boy at the New York World newspaper, while attending evening art classes at the National Academy of Design.

Ernie Bushmiller ran errands for the staff cartoonists and was given occasional illustration assignments, including a Sunday feature by Harry Houdini.

Ernie Bushmiller had already been producing a comic strip for the New York Evening Graphic titled Mac the Manager.

Once he began to move away from Whittington's depiction of Fritzi, Ernie Bushmiller began to model her after his fiance, Abby Bohnet, the daughter of a train conductor.

In 1931, they headed for Hollywood, where Ernie Bushmiller wrote gags for Harold Lloyd's Movie Crazy, continuing to draw Fritzi Ritz at the same time.

Ernie Bushmiller started working each day about 2pm, and he often sat at his drawing table well into the early morning hours of the next day.

Ernie Bushmiller usually began a strip with the last panel and then worked back toward the first panel.

Ernie Bushmiller choreographed his familiar formal elements inside the tightest frame of any major strip, and that helped make it the most beautiful, as a whole, of any in the papers.

Ernie Bushmiller had the hand of an architect, the mind of a silent film comedian, and the soul of an accountant.

Ernie Bushmiller's gags have the abstract feel of math and Nancy was, in fact, a mini-algebra equation masquerading as a comic strip for close to 50 years.

Ernie Bushmiller didn't draw A tree, A house, A car.

In 1979, Ernie Bushmiller was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, but he continued to produce the strip with the help of assistants Will Johnson and Al Plastino.

Ernie Bushmiller lived in Stamford, Connecticut, where he died in 1982.

In 2011, Ernie Bushmiller was listed as a Judges' Choice for The Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame.

Ernie Bushmiller's work has been repeatedly addressed by other artists: Andy Warhol made a 1961 painting based on Nancy, and Joe Brainard made numerous works based on Nancy.

Many cartoonists have produced work directly inspired by or commenting on Ernie Bushmiller's art, including Art Spiegelman, Mark Newgarden, Chris Ware and Zippy cartoonist Bill Griffith, who has written an essay on Ernie Bushmiller.

Griffith revealed in the August 19,2020 Zippy strip that he was writing and drawing a graphic biography of Ernie Bushmiller; it was published in August 2023.