Ernie Bushmiller

Cartoonist. He created the daily comic strip and character "Nancy", which at its peak ran in over 800 daily newspapers. The son of an artist, vaudevillian, and bartender he quit school at the age of 14 to work as a copy boy at the "New York World" newspaper in New York City, New York. He attended classes at the National Academy of Design and ran errands for the staff cartoonist. He persuaded to be allowed to receive occasional drawing assignments, one of which was illustrating a Sunday feature about magic written by Harry Houdini. Early in 1925, Ernie Bushmiller was asked to ghost a flapper comic strip called "Fritzi Ritz" when its originator, Larry Whittington, left to work for William R. Hearst's rival paper, the "New York Journal American", where Whittington would create another strip about a flapper, "Mazie the Model". Cast in the mold of Cliff Sterrett's "Polly and Her Pals" and launched October 9, 1922, "Fritzi Ritz" was a "pretty girl strip" the comedy of which is generated by a flapper who wins a beauty contest and becomes a movie actress in the New York film colony. The character of "Fritzi' was modeled after Ernie's fiance, the daughter of a train conductor. In 1931, he headed for Hollywood, where Bushmiller wrote gags for Harold Lloyd's "Movie Crazy" while continuing to draw Fritzi Ritz at the same time. A year later, they returned to the Bronx. He introduced "Nancy", Fritzi's niece, to the strip on January 2, 1933. The character proved popular, so she appeared more often. The strip told continuing stories in those years, and in 1935, Ernie Bushmiller did a continuity about "Nancy" running away, which endeared the character to the strips readers. In the process Ernie Bushmiller had unwittingly permitted his title character to be upstaged. Then on January 24, 1938, he introduced 'Sluggo", the stubbly-headed tough kid who becomes Nancy's constant companion, and before too many more months, the cartoonist capitulated to what was now obvious: Nancy was clearly his star. By the end of 1938, he had struck Fritzi's name from the strip's marquee and put "Nancy's" in its place. From that point on, the strip ran few continuities. It became a gag-a-day strip. Ernie Bushmiller, one of the founding members of the National Cartoonists Society, received its Humor Comic Strip Award and its Reuben Award in 1976 for his work on "Nancy". He died in 1982 at the age of 76.