Just in time for the Holiday Season comes this new volume of NANCY dailies with a title just fitting for this time of year! An event to which I say "YAY" instead of "BAW WAH!" even though I really could have used this book for funtime reading during the Christmas breaks of 1969 through at least 1972 when I was really on a hefty comic strip appreciation roll! And although such a serious reprinting of classic (for me 1945-1982) NANCY strips as this would have really suited me fantastic-like during my pre-pimples and body hair days, at least I can now live securely knowing that at least some of the public's tastes have finally caught up to my own to the point where such an enterprise as a collection of this friz-topped gal's oft-laughed at ('stead of with) strip is now commercially viable enough to have even warranted a second volume. Believe-you-me that's one thing that will make me happy here in the post-everything that's fun in this world kultur we now live in!
By the time these strips were hitting the funny pages being spread across the living room floors of Ameriga, NANCY was certainly becoming the funnie that it would be famous for at least until the fateful demise (in the late-seventies) and ultimate bye-bye (in 1982) of strip creator Ernie Bushmiller. That only means we've got thirty-five-plus more years of dailies (I guess they'll get to the Sundays one of these days) of NANCYs to look forward to, a boss concept to absorb even if Bushmiller was apt to repeat a mid-forties gag twenty/thirty years later when inspiration failed him. But still, 'tis fantab re-living those single-digit NANCY memories that I've told you about repeatedly, even if these particular strips were produced a good long time before I even hit the zygote stage but hey an appreciation of every pen line and badgag is still embedded into my DNA (along with HENRY and FERD'NAND too!) and it might be in your's too.
Highlights include a week's full of gags where Nancy and Sluggo meet up with a new brainy girl who resembles a seven-year-old Janeane Garofalo, Nancy's lookalike cousin Judy visiting, Sluggo's attempts to become a major ukulele performer and his getting a job carrying a sandwich sign all over town. (The various week-longs where Nancy stays with her neighbors the Sputters also rank high, if only because they pit Nancy up against a grown man 'stead of Aunt Fritzi for a change.) You may have your own personal favorites and you may sneer at the entire idea of anybody giving NANCY the time o' day when there are all of those "important" strips one could follow, but there's only one way to find out now and it ain't by upping your nose at this class act strip without reminding yourself...as to what kind of a snobbish asshole you've been for your entire life and will remain until the bitter end, that's for sure! Buy this 'un and discover your true inner wretchedness!
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