Ernie Bushmiller‘s ubiquitous comic strip has intrigued me since I was a kid. It was rarely funny, sometimes creepy, and the drawing style was unique and constrained. Bushmiller was more of a draftsman than a comic strip artist, and it’s obvious that he used tracing templates, photography, and in his later years, photocopiers.
One day in the early 1980s, this panel showed up in the Sunday funnies. I was hooked, and I began paying closer attention to the Zen of Nancy.
The .gifs above have been posted here previously, and scraping them into a pile seemed like the proper thing to do. The one in color was an early experiment with Jasc Animation Shop v.3.11, a program I acquired in 2012 (thanks, Possum). Most of the panels were lifted from Nancy strips posted on X/Twitter by @JohnnyCallicutt and re-used with minimal editing.
[For more Nancy, Sluggo & Aunt Fritzi stuff visit The Nancy & Sluggo Archive.]
Tacky Raccoons 
wow, I haven’t thought of this in so long
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Bushmiller was kind of an odd duck graphics-wise, and his bio is interesting.
This panel hung over my desk for years: https://bunkstrutts.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/nancy-time-2.jpg
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Good eye for the odd style and interesting influences.
Nicely put together tribute.
Do you have Don Marquis in your library of goodies? Archy and Mehitibel; very interesting series.
There was another illustrator from that era or a little earlier and I cannot recall the name – a cat and rat were characters with action in the panels emphasized by onomatopoeia notations (zzzzip for example).
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You’re referring to Krazy Kat & Ignatz the Mouse. The other names sound vaguely familiar, but I’d have to axe the google. These days I’m paying attention to A.D. Condo’s The Oubursts of Everett True. The guy is effin’ brutal!!
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