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Joe Brainard: The Nancy Book
Fifteen years of Joe Brainard’s illustrated appropriation of classic comic strip character, Nancy From 1963 to 1978, Joe Brainard created more than 100 artworks that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into a variety of astonishing situations. The Nancy Book is the first collection of Brainard's Nancy texts, drawings, collages and paintings, with full page reproductions of more than 50 works, several of which have never been exhibited or published before.
144 pages, Hardcover
First published April 30, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 13, 2008
If you’re not already madly in love with Nancy (and I think a ton of people are — I used to have a Nancy T-shirt and I couldn’t walk more than a couple blocks in NYC without someone stopping me to ask where I got it), you will be after looking at Joe Brainard’s The Nancy Book. I promise. I can’t remember the last time that a book cracked me up like this. (“If Nancy was a Ball” is perhaps the one that made me laugh most — it’s sort of inexplicably charming and weirdo-bizarro all at the same time.)
One caveat: if you're upset at the thought of Nancy in engaging in, um, adult activities, you should probably give a miss to the middle section of the book.
One caveat: if you're upset at the thought of Nancy in engaging in, um, adult activities, you should probably give a miss to the middle section of the book.
June 11, 2009
Joe Brainard is the wit of the wits in New York City mega-art/poetry culture circ. 1960's & 1970's. This late and great artist is a slice of joy in a world that is sometimes not enjoyable. Also "Nancy" was a comic strip from my era, so there is a pull there. Something I don't think about, but now revisiting via the eyes and art of Joe Brainard. Also a art history course of some imagination and again great wit.
January 6, 2026
WHAT EXACTLY DREW the brilliant writer and visual artist Joe Brainard (1942-1994) to Ernie Bushmiller's comic Nancy?
There have always been a few strips that attracted more educated and sophisticated readers (Krazy Kat in the 1920s, Pogo in the 1950s, Peanuts in the 1960s, Doonesbury in the 1970s, Calvin and Hobbes in the 1980s), but Nancy seems an unlikely candidate for that kind of attention. Its humor was broad, its drawing plain and reduced to essentials, its vision of the culture straight down the middle of the road. Yet Brainard is by no means the strip's only admirer: Scott McCloud, Art Spiegelman, and Bill Griffiths are also advocates.
That Nancy is a kind of apotheosis of ordinariness may be what fascinated Brainard. His astonishing "I Remember," among its other virtues, holds nothing back in its embrace of ordinariness. So when Brainard adds Nancy's face to a De Kooning, or a Picasso, or a Goya, the juxtaposition of a drawing style meant to be infinitely reproducible with revered works of individual genius, there's a beauty in the sheer incongruity, masterpieces made cozy and homey by the bare-bones geometry of Nancy's face, Nancy elevated to the firmament by her placement in iconic paintings.
Or, when Nancy and another comic character, the silent Henry, engage in athletic sex, we get a different effect, not unlike the détourné comics of the Situationists. The domesticated is re-wilded, the complacent surface of the family newspaper is ruffled by anarchic winds, the sanitized and safe rendered dirty and dangerous.
The Nancy Book is an homage that becomes a work in its own right. That one could not imagine such a project with, say, Blondie, may reveal in a roundabout way the nature of Bushmiller's idiosyncratic genius.
There have always been a few strips that attracted more educated and sophisticated readers (Krazy Kat in the 1920s, Pogo in the 1950s, Peanuts in the 1960s, Doonesbury in the 1970s, Calvin and Hobbes in the 1980s), but Nancy seems an unlikely candidate for that kind of attention. Its humor was broad, its drawing plain and reduced to essentials, its vision of the culture straight down the middle of the road. Yet Brainard is by no means the strip's only admirer: Scott McCloud, Art Spiegelman, and Bill Griffiths are also advocates.
That Nancy is a kind of apotheosis of ordinariness may be what fascinated Brainard. His astonishing "I Remember," among its other virtues, holds nothing back in its embrace of ordinariness. So when Brainard adds Nancy's face to a De Kooning, or a Picasso, or a Goya, the juxtaposition of a drawing style meant to be infinitely reproducible with revered works of individual genius, there's a beauty in the sheer incongruity, masterpieces made cozy and homey by the bare-bones geometry of Nancy's face, Nancy elevated to the firmament by her placement in iconic paintings.
Or, when Nancy and another comic character, the silent Henry, engage in athletic sex, we get a different effect, not unlike the détourné comics of the Situationists. The domesticated is re-wilded, the complacent surface of the family newspaper is ruffled by anarchic winds, the sanitized and safe rendered dirty and dangerous.
The Nancy Book is an homage that becomes a work in its own right. That one could not imagine such a project with, say, Blondie, may reveal in a roundabout way the nature of Bushmiller's idiosyncratic genius.
January 24, 2022
Read He Fancied Nancy to learn more about this remarkable (remarkably what?) text.
November 9, 2008
A pretty book, and I heart Joe Brainard, enjoy his back-of-the-classroom art (somehow it comes off gentle and kind). But. (Butt) Nancy is so much more than Joe's fun with her -- this really needs to be called Joe's Nancy Book -- so there can be (is there already?) another that celebrates the whole of her weird fame. And includes Ernie in the fun. Can you believe that Mr. Bushmiller is hardly even mentioned here? Introduced as "back story." Ouch.
March 5, 2013
Rereading I REMEMBER led me to THE NANCY BOOK. I always thought Nancy was the weirdest comic strip character around. She even gave me the creeps when I was little (probably the hair). So, to see her here like this in so many subversive ways felt right.
October 6, 2013
Nancy is charming. The art Brainard made with Nancy is charming. And the contributors' essays and bits of Brainard's own writing surrounding the images collected here are equally so. Glad I spent an afternoon reading / viewing it.
February 3, 2009
my favorite is kleenex nancy. it's so huh? also, the piece of brainard writing in the book is so droll, and sweet at the same time.
July 7, 2010
Nancy, Sluggo and Joe. How could it possibly go wrong?
June 3, 2012
so excited to read this . . . seen some of it . . . ahhh the Southbank Poetry library in London rocks!!!
April 13, 2016
Brainnard was more of a comics artist than fine artist, and so his works serve better when read as comics than fine art.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews