Mark Lasky briefly handled the daily strip in 1982/1983 until his death from cancer at age 29. 1982 to 2018 Īfter Bushmiller's death in 1982, the strip was produced by different writers and artists.

At its peak in the 1970s, Nancy ran in more than 880 newspapers, before falling to 79 shortly before Guy Gilchrist's departure from the strip in 2018. Fritzi Ritz continued as a Sunday feature (with Nancy as a topper) until that year when it too was replaced with Nancy permanently. įritzi Ritz became a secondary character, although her solo strip continued as a Sunday-only strip, where her relationship with Phil Fumble (who'd been featured in his own Sunday topper strip since 1932) was an ongoing presence until his departure in 1968. Comics historian Don Markstein ascribed the strip's success to Bushmiller's 'bold, clear art style, combined with his ability to construct a type of gag that appealed to a very broad audience.

Hager, the editor of the Owensboro, Kentucky Inquirer-Messenger (now the Messenger-Inquirer), lobbied for the change Sluggo Smith, Nancy's friend from the ' wrong side of the tracks' had been introduced earlier that year, and the strip's popularity rose. But the little dickens was soon stealing the show and Bushmiller, the ingrate, was taking all the bows.' Nancy became the focus of the daily strip, which was renamed for her in 1938 after Lawrence W. In 1949, he was quoted as saying that he originally intended Nancy 'just as an incidental character and I planned to keep her for about a week and then dump her. On January 2, 1933, Bushmiller introduced Fritzi's niece, Nancy. Larry Whittington began Fritzi Ritz in 1922, and it was taken over by Bushmiller three years later. The character of Nancy, a precocious eight-year-old, first appeared in the strip Fritzi Ritz, a comic about a professional actress and her family and friends.

The new strip took the old one's daily slot, while Fritzi Ritz continued as a Sunday, with Nancy taking the Sunday slot previously filled by Bushmiller's Phil Fumble strip beginning on October 30, 1938.

After Fritzi's niece Nancy was introduced in 1933, Fritzi Ritz evolved to focus more and more on Nancy instead of Fritzi. It was spun off from Fritzi Ritz, a strip Bushmiller inherited from creator Larry Whittington in 1925. Nancy is an American comic strip, originally written and drawn by Ernie Bushmiller and distributed by United Feature Syndicate and Andrews McMeel Syndication.

Nancy Eats Food by Ernie Bushmiller