As a kid, I would spend a couple of weeks at my grandparent's house in Holmes County, Florida.  They lived on a large farm and so the only newspaper of interest they got was Grit.  This is where I first saw Nancy and Sluggo (which as far as I can recall did not appear in my Dad's newspaper, The Tallahassee Democrat.  So, I thought it would be interesting to interview the person who currently does the strip.  I talked with Nancy cartoonist Guy Gilchrist and learned a lot about the comic strip business I never knew before.  For those who don't know, Guy is an author/illustrator of children's books.  He started his comic strip career with Jim Henson's Muppets.  Later, he took over the classic syndicated comic strip Nancy and Sluggo in addition to his other works such as Mudpie and his brand new syndicated Sunday strip, Your Angels Speak.  Guy was very gracious to me in allowing me two phone sessions, filling 110 minutes of tape!  *grin*  So here is part one of that interview.

AstroNerdBoy:  Nancy and Sluggo have been around for many years.  How difficult was it for you to convince the syndicate to allow you to do the strip?

Guy Gilchrist:  Well, you've got it backwards.  I was the one that had to be convinced to give it a shot.  I had been huge fan of Ernie Bushmiller (the original creator of Nancy).  I loved his artwork, but certainly the connection between his art and my art was like Earth to Pluto; there was a lot of difference.  The work I did in Muppets was very animated.  Ernie's work was very balanced and tight. 

What happened was that I was writing children's books and freelance stuff.  I got a call from my agent.  He told me that there was a rumor that Jerry Scott was leaving Nancy to spend more time on Baby Blues and Zits.  United (Feature Syndicate) was looking for a replacement or had just found one.   He asked me if I would be interested and I said, "I don't think so." 

I had seen Jerry's version of Nancy five or six years before.  He'd been doing the strip for about eleven years and Jerry had made the strip his own and it wasn't something that I wanted to be involved in.  Jerry's style was Jerry's style, Ernie's style was Ernie's style, and I had my style.  To me, Nancy was Ernie Bushmiller's and I didn't think that I could ever draw like that or write like that.  I wasn't even sure that I wanted to, to be honest with you.  So my agent said, "Why don't you think about it because United is interested in finding someone that has a new approach."  So I said, "OK, I'll think about it."

A friend of mine, Gill Fox (a golden age cartoonist from the 1940's who is now in his 80's), who worked with me on Muppets knew Ernie real well.  I called Gill and asked, "Do you have any original's of Ernie's?"  And he did, he had about a month's worth and let me borrow them.  I looked at the originals; they were all from the late 30's and they were gorgeous.  There was humor and adventure, like most of the strips in the 30's.  It was beautifully drawn and the backgrounds were much more illustrative than I had remembered them being in the 60's when I was growing up.  I really liked that and I liked Fritzi (Nancy's aunt). 

So I sat and drew Fritzi for a while and I could draw Fritzi OK.  Then I sat and tried to draw Nancy and Sluggo and I couldn't draw them worth a darn.  I mean I stunk at it!  They didn't look anything like Nancy and Sluggo.  It seemed like they were so perfect and so simple; the line was so tight that I just couldn't do them.  That got me really upset.  I sort of felt challenged, so I drew and drew and drew and drew for the next couple of weeks.  Whenever I had a spare moment, I was drawing Nancy and Sluggo, even to the point of slavishly tracing it over and over and over again and then trying to draw them on my own.  Eventually I put together six samples and I called my agent and said, "OK, I'm going to give it a shot."  He was shocked and didn't even know I was interested.  I guess it was just the challenge that got me hooked.

The six samples went into United and the next day they called and offered me a contract. 

ANB:  Wow!

Guy:  I felt it was really necessary to try to re-animate Nancy and Sluggo and Fritzi in the nostalgia feel of Ernie, especially at the beginning.

ANB:  Once you had sent in those six samples, I'm assuming you'd managed to nail down Ernie's style in drawing Nancy and Sluggo.  As I look at them today, they look very much like the classics.

Guy:  I appreciate that.  Over the years much of my style has gone into it.  They've become much more animated.  As a matter of fact, these days I ink them with a brush.  I don't even ink them with a pen any more although I still use a pen for the background and detail stuff, but most of the characters I ink with a brush.  I find it is more bouncy and more animated and a little more lively.  Certainly when I first started, I really slavishly tried to draw exactly like Ernie.  There was also a feeling at the syndicate that they wanted to play up the fact that they were going to be doing this classic rendition of the feature and hoped there could be some new interest in the strip.  They hoped that they could be able to pick up some new papers and not lose the old papers that had been running Jerry's version.  They did a whole new re-launch. 

So I worked real hard at drawing the characters the way Ernie did and we tried to come up with the same sort of gags that he did that were very much like sight gags with very few words.  We also needed to completely re-introduce Aunt Fritzi because she hadn't been a part of the strip for all of the years that Jerry did it.  Rollo the rich kid hadn't been in there.  Irma hadn't been there.  Spike the bully.  We didn't just want to be nostalgic, we wanted to do as much updating as we could.  So I would draw a cell phone or a computer and digital televisions and that sort of thing.  I'd draw it in that clunky, "everything weighs a thousand pounds" way that Ernie drew.  We also added a couple of new characters.  We added a Hispanic character named Maria and we added an Afro-American character named Homer into the gang.  They were also drawn as I imagined Ernie would have drawn them. 

Once we did our launch around Labor Day, 1995, we started getting letters from fans that had favorites of old Ernie's strips.  They were asking if we would reprint them.  They didn't even know that somebody else was drawing the strip.  Some people did write in saying, "I'm so glad my childhood friend is back."  They had particular gags that they remembered from being a kid and they wanted to see it somehow.  So for the first two years, we decided that I would draw a few here and there of the Ernie gags and put them in just because fans wanted them. 

ANB:  That's interesting.  The (comic art magazine) Hogan's Alley has a feature called "Deja Viewed".  They had shown a classic Ernie Bushmiller strip and one of yours and they were almost identical.  I'd always wondered why and was planning to ask about that.  I see that it was done on purpose.

Guy:  Actually they ran a whole article about that.  Of course they, not having any insider information, didn't know where this was coming from.  They found the same gag from '58 and '95 or '96.  The first year or so we did that on purpose just because the fans wanted it and United thought it was a good idea.  So even though it was a little odd, I really kind of looked at it at the beginning like when I first started doing the Muppets.  I always called it "babysitting icons".  At the beginning when I took on drawing Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, and stuff, they weren't my characters.  They certainly were after a couple of years after Jim Henson gave me full reign to do whatever I wanted, knowing that I loved the characters and really cared for them and understood them.   When I first started doing Nancy, it wasn't mine yet; it really was Ernie's and it belonged to Ernie and it belonged to all the fans that had been faithful followers of Nancy, Sluggo, Fritzi, etc. since 1933 when Nancy was introduced.  I put my ego aside.  I always tried to figure out how Ernie would do it.  I created style sheets of all the different Ernie expressions that he had on all the different characters and I really tried to make it as close to the original as I could.  It didn't bother me that much that we did some of the same gags that Ernie did because it seemed that it was meant to be that way. 

Over the years, little by little by little, we stopped doing the gags that were Ernie gags pretty early on.  Then more and more of my own stuff started to creep in.  I've been doing it now for quite a few years, so there's probably half me, half Ernie.  I think that people are comfortable with me now and they're probably comfortable with my babysittership of these beloved characters.  I certainly would never do anything that would be out of character for them.  I mean I have my other strips that I draw where it is all of me.  In Nancy, I still work very hard at the commitment to the older readership that grew up with Nancy.  Don't forget that most of the readership of Nancy are young kids.  If I ask you, "How old is Nancy?", you'd say, "50-60 years old".  If I ask a little kid, "How old is Nancy?", they'd say, "Seven" because that's how old Nancy is in the strip.  Nancy and Sluggo are about seven.  We have that readership as well.  For the same reason you liked Nancy as a child, because it was easy to read and understand, that's the same strip that I want to produce every day.  It is easy to read and easy to understand because I need to build up the next generation.

ANB:  And I think you are doing a very good job at it.  Since there is such an interest in the strip and you've been doing this for a number of years, is there any chance that you might put out a Nancy and Sluggo collection book?

Guy:  Yeah, we would certainly like to.  We've been trying to get something put together for a couple of years.  It looks like there is something on the stove now cooking.  So I'm hoping that we are going to be able to do that.  It's been kind of wild that we haven't gotten a Nancy collection out there yet.  We've had quite a few Mudpie collections out and other stuff that I do.  And even now with Your Angels Speak being a couple of months old, we are already looking at a book deal there.  With Nancy, the deal has to be the right deal with United. So hopefully they'll be able to put something together pretty soon. 

ANB:  That's be great cause then I could add it to my collection.  I've got a giant bookshelf full of comic strip books, some quite old that are out of print and some are the new stuff.

Guy:  You know, Kitchen Sink did a whole bunch of the Ernie collections.  Brian Walker (Mort Walker's son) put out a book, The Best of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy. 

ANB:  And they are all out of print.

Guy:  They are all out of print, but so far there hasn't been one collection of my Nancy that I do with my brother Brad.  I'd sure like to see it happen.   I get letters and e-mails asking if there's going to be a Fritzi collection.  Fritzi has a lot of fans out there.

ANB:  I talk to a lot of up-and-coming cartoonist that want to break into the business.  One of their main complaints is that old comic strips never seem to go away.  You've got Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes that are in reruns.  You've got Snuffy Smith, Blondie, and even Nancy which are just continued on by different cartoonist.  So they say, "We can't break in."  Do you have any comments about that?

Guy:  Sure.  For one thing, besides doing Nancy, I do three other features.  I do a once a week panel for DBR Media called Screams which is a little monster cartoon based on the Universal Monsters.  I do a once a week painting and inspirational thoughts for meditation called Your Angels Speak that United Media puts out.  Then I do the Mudpie comic strip that Copley does and that's daily.  When I tried to sell any of those features, I was going up against the same thing. 

I've heard this comment many times so I have two sides of the issue that I want to address.  As somebody that has to compete with my strip that's established, but also Beetle Bailey, Hi & Lois, Family Circus, Blondie, and all of the ones you just named, I have to create something that's different than any of those other things.  If it is different enough and it has enough artistic and literate merit and the syndicate thinks that they can sell it, then they are going to give it a shot.  I've been turned down as many times if not many more times than most of the people that are reading this article.  I've been in this business for over 25 years and I've created a lot of different comic strips that for one reason or another didn't go. 

There's always going to be the classic strips or the comic that is entrenched -- the "popular strip".  Did Get Fuzzy have a difficult time getting into the 400 papers it is in now because Peanuts was in the way?  Or even another cat strip like Garfield was in the way?  Or even another dog strip like Marmaduke was in the way?  No.  It was unique and it had its own artistic merit.  Darby Conley (the creator of Get Fuzzy) wasn't in with anybody; he wasn't established in any way that I know of.  But he was very good.  I don't know how many times he was turned down, but he got himself a hit. 

The Mudpie comic that I do is in about 100 papers these days.  I couldn't get a syndicate to buy it initially.  So I self-syndicated it myself to those 100 papers over a 5-year period.  That's how much I believed in it.  If you believe in what you do, and/or you believe in yourself that you can keep on producing product after product after product after product, then hopefully someone will go for it.  Then, you will succeed at this business.  If all of these comic strips that you just named were suddenly taken out of the paper, for one thing, those syndicates wouldn't be around any more.  They wouldn't have any money to spend on the new guys coming up. 

It costs a lot of money to launch a strip.  The strips you are talking about are the body and soul of the various syndicates.  Because those popular features are out there, that salesman with your new feature that you've been lucky enough to sell, has a client list of, let's say Lynn Johnston's client list of 2000 papers (For Better or For Worse).   At United, this guy knows 2000 editors that he can go into these 2000 offices with your brand new feature that United just bought and get a shot at selling it.  If he didn't have that client base because of all these strips, were is he going to go?  I know you were talking about what they call the "dead cartoonist comics".  Are you going to say that none of these people that do those strips deserve work?  Fred Lasswell (Snuffy Smith)?  John Cullen Murphy (Prince Valiant)?  On and on and on.  Dick Moores who did Gasoline Alley and now Jim Scancarelli that does it.  Jim's great!  Leonard Starr that took over Annie.  I mean, you've got some brilliant guys doing these comics. 

And I've got news for you.  If you are one of the old comics like I am, you've got to be that much better every day to stay because all of the salesmen for the syndicates are after you saying, "Well that's been in your paper way, way to long.  I have this new strip."  And here we sit trying to be loyal to the fan base of the established strip and yet build new readership when we're constantly getting knocked because we are not the original guys doing it any more.  I'm going to tell you, if we can stay in the 400 or more papers that we are in, its a combination of a loyal readership and the fact that we might not be doing such a bad job after all.

At some point I'm going to retire from this.  One of the kids that's reading this interview right now might be the one that applies for this job.  All of the sudden, he or she might get a chance to work on an internationally known feature and get their foot in the door.  Look at what happened when Uncle Fred (Lasswell) passed away.  There's was an opening and now John Rose is doing a fantastic job.  When Leonard Starr retired from Annie, the guy doing it now is doing a great job. 

Click here for part 2