Here's an adaptation of Scott McCloud's Five-Card Nancy concept. Ernie Bushmiller really pared his strip down to the bare minimum, the basic building blocks if you will, of the comic-strip language. Bushmiller's own "Nancy" strips were sort of dull, but after cutting the panels apart and arranging them into various combinations I've found that Nancy can be surprisingly hilarious. It can be recombined into strips of startling emotional power and sublime stupidity.
While cutting up all these strips to play the game, I noticed that every Nancy strip is divided in half. These halves are sometimes subdivided into two irregular panels, so a Bushmiller strip can consist of two "half panels," one "half" and two "smalls," or four "smalls." I decided to follow these formulae when rearranging panels into new Nancy strips. Scott McCloud's original rules produce long, rambling epics that become tedious and lose their impact long before they are finished. Not so these short 2, 3, or 4 panel wonders, which are a quick whallop of comic brilliance Ernie Bushmiller never intended.
"Nancy" is copyright United Feature Syndicate and is used without permission. Hope I don't get in trouble for doing this, but I think it's a hoot! Enjoy.
