Bushmiller's Nancy possessed a transcendentally formalist quality and an almost unfathomable precision. There is timelessness in its anachronisms, minimalism in its blankness and a seductive rhythm in its endlessly reiterated theme of stupid amazement.

The superficial lameness and the formulaic art created a self-contained world without objective correlative. Its purely abstract existence daily lurched into absurdity through the characters' antics and then back into balance by means of the all-important gag. It was the anchoring effect of Bushmiller's imagery, and the motion itself, that mattered.

Why Nancy?

Ernie Bushmiller's comic strip "Nancy" is a landmark achievement: A Comic so simply drawn it can be reduced to the size of a postage stamp and still be legible; an approach so formulaic as to become the very definition of the "gag-strip"; a sense of humor so obscure, so mute, so without malice as to allow faithful readers to march through whole decades of art and story without ever once cracking a smile.

Nancy is Plato's playground. Ernie Bushmiller didn't draw A tree, A house, A car. Oh, no. Ernie Bushmiller drew THE tree, THE house, THE car. Much has been made of the "three rocks." Art Spiegelman explains how a drawing of three rocks in a background scene was Ernie's way of showing us there were some rocks in the background. It was always three. Why? Because two rocks wouldn't be "some rocks." Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. And four rocks was unacceptable because four rocks would indicate "some rocks" BUT IT WOULD BE ONE ROCK MORE THAN WAS NECESSARY TO CONVEY THE IDEA OF "SOME ROCKS."

A Nancy panel is an irreduceable concept, an atom, and the comic strip is a molecule. With 5-Card Nancy we create new molecules out of Ernie's atoms.

Says Jerry Moriarty, artist of "Jack Survives": "I believe there is a formula of Hume, Humor and Humest. Ernie Bushmiller and I are Hume."