Similarly, the comic strip, Nancy, is from a time before humor, but that was its creator, Ernie Bushmiller’s intent. Over the nearly fifty years he drew Nancy, he intentionally directed the strip to be the definition of simple in both graphics and content.
Beetle Bailey’s creator, Mort Walker, told me that as a young cartoonist, he was excited to meet the already-famous Bushmiller and asked what he thought of his own relatively new comic about a dimwitted army private. Bushmiller responded enthusiastically, “It’s good, but you’ve got to dumb it down. Dumb it down!”
Bushmiller died in 1982, but the strip continues to this day, having been passed from artist to artist every few years, all of whom have tried to update it and make it funny.
In recent years, the original Nancy has come to be revered and almost deified by professional cartoonists. I don’t follow newspaper comics and can’t say I’ve seen a single version done since Bushmiller’s death, but I suspect it is safe to say that the admiration Nancy has engendered among cartoonists is because it was simple and lame. It seems to me that updating its graphics or content is a losing game, like adding furniture and appliances to a zen garden.
I confess that while I can (sort of) understand my colleagues’ reverence for Nancy, I’ve never been a fan. Though I’m not immune to loving something for its awfulness—Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda by writer/director Ed Wood are two of my favorite films for that very reason—Nancy isn’t in my wheelhouse. The Olmec heads are, however!
I’ve read a bit about them and have seen one at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. All of them have facial features that are reminiscent of Africans, which led early researchers to the fascinating theory that Africans may have crossed the Atlantic long before Columbus, but that theory has been debunked. Indigenous people from the Mexican Gulf coast still look much like the sculptures, and genetic testing has shown they have no African heritage.
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