The latest addition to Fantagraphics’ award- winning classic comic strip reprint series.

A funny thing happened on the way to comic-strip immortality. For many years, Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, with its odd-looking, squat heroine, nearly abstract art, and often super-corny gags, was perceived as the stodgiest, squarest comic strip in the world. Popular with newspaper readers, true — but definitely not a strip embraced by comic-strip connoisseurs, like Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy or Terry and the Pirates.

But then those connoisseurs took a closer look, and began to realize that Bushmiller’s art approached its own kind of cartoon perfection, and those corny gags often achieved a striking zen quality. In its own way, it turned out Nancy was in fact the most iconic comic strip of all. (The American Heritage Dictionary actually uses a Nancy strip to illustrate its entry on “comic strip.”)

Charter members of the Nancy revival include Art Spiegelman, who published Mark Newgarden’s famous “Love’s Savage Fury” (featuring Nancy and Bazooka Joe) in an early issue of RAW; Fletcher Hanks anthologist Paul Karasik; Zippy the Pinhead creator Bill Griffith; underground publisher Denis Kitchen, who released several volumes of Nancy collections in the 1980s; Understanding Comics’ Scott McCloud, who created the “Five-Card Nancy” card game; Joe Brainard, who produced an entire Nancy book of paintings in 2008; and Andy Warhol, who produced a painting based on Nancy.

Beginning in the Winter of 2011, fans will be dancing with joy as Fantagraphics unveils an ongoing Nancy reprint project. Each volume contain a whopping full four years of daily Nancy strips (a Sunday Nancy project looms in the future), collected in a fat, square (what else, for the “squarest” strip in the world?) package designed by Jacob (Popeye, Beasts!, Willie and Joe) Covey.

This first volume will collect every daily strip from 1943 to 1946. (Fantagraphics will eventually release Nancy’s first five years, 1938-1942, but given the scarcity of archival material for these years we are giving ourselves some extra time to collate it all.)

This first Nancy volume will feature an introduction by another stellar Bushmiller fan, Daniel Clowes (from whose collection most of the strips in this volume were scanned), a biography of the artist, and much more. 432 pages of black and white comics

Spanish Description: A lo largo de tres decadas de fructifera carrera de psicologa, sexologa, columnista, conferencista y presentadora de su programa de television: Quien tiene la razon?, la Dra. Nancy Alvarez ha recibido miles de cartas de personas que le piden ayuda y asesoria, acerca de multiples temas que abarcan desde la crianza a la sexualidad. Ninguna de esas cartas ha quedado sin respuesta, y como son cuestiones que nos atanen, ahora estan a disposicion de todos en el libro Nancy, que hago? Y por que ese titulo? Precisamente porque esa es la pregunta con que termina gran parte de esos pedidos de ayuda. Nancy que hago? no solo es un libro de autoayuda, pues tambien cuenta con pasajes autobiograficos de esta experta que lleva de la mano al lector por un mundo sorprendente de conocimientos invaluables para la vida de pareja y las relaciones de familia, con un lenguaje ocurrente, espontaneo y sincero, que aligera la carga en el tratamiento de cuestiones existenciales que erroneamente tratamos como si fueran tabues. Un libro de consulta que nos hace conocernos mas a nosotros mismos, a nuestros seres queridos, y nos sirve de guia indispensable en el camino complejo de las relaciones humanas, deshaciendo mitos y acercandonos mas a la verdad de cada dia.