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Bullseye with Jesse Thorne is a production of maximum fund.org

and is distributed by NPR. It's Boles High. I'm Jesse Thorne. 90 years ago, Nancy was born. Just Nancy, no surname. She's 8 years old, about hip high.

She's got a red skirt, black sweater vest, and a bow in her hair. You know the hair, right? It's almost perfectly

round, short, frizzy. She is a comics character. You could actually say she is in a way the comics character.

Older than peanuts, older than Beedle Bailey and Dennis the Menace.

It's also beloved by connoisseurs of the genre. You don't have to be a

super fan to love it, of course. It is one of the most broadly successful newspaper

comic strips ever. But it's also a snobs favorite, like if the Velvet Underground did

Green Day numbers. Why? Well, the aesthetic is iconic in that everyone would recognize it and also in that it is made of icons,

the simplest forms that represent something much more complex.

That's what comics are, after all.

And instead of being about old familiar characters

like a lot of strips, the jokes in Nancy

have a surreal almost abstract quality. The punchline is as often about the comics form as it is about kids causing trouble.

One of those comics super nerds who loves Nancy is Bill Griffith.

Griffith is a newspaper comics artist himself. He's written Zippy the Pinhead for 50 years.

He got turned on to the magic of Nancy decades ago by a fellow

alternative comics luminary, Art Spiegelman. Griffith's new book is a graphic biography of Nancy's creator. It's called Three Rocks,

the story of Ernie Bushmiller. I'm so grateful to get to talk to Bill about his wonderful book.

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