There’s not much to say about this. Not much at all. So I don’t. In fact I don’t think you should look.
You’ve been warned, so don’t blame me.
Pass it along, if you wish
42 Responses to Comic Sins: Boinnnggggg
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_@_v – surprisingly only mildly disturbing… nightmare kindling at best…
Kinda reminds me of the Twilight Zone adaptation of “It’s a Good Life” with Billy Mumy.
http://tinyurl.com/4bkbhq
Wish them into the cornfield!
Ahhhhh… Periquita (her name in the Spanish version)…. always found her disturbing for some reason.
This is creepy in so many levels…
But Ernie, isn’t there some dashing way to depict yon eyeballs’ directional focus? How am I supposed to know what they’re looking at?
YAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH
Where’s the Brillo?? Must. Scour. Eyes.
They’re looking at YOU….
Pretty darn disturbing to me.
I always wondered how Nancy could sleep with all those little spines poking into her head.
“… lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be living… until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’.”
Charming!
I always wanted to like that old cartoon (my name of course) but it was just so…dumb.
As a kid, I couldn’t quite figure out why I disliked “Nancy” so much, when I liked pretty much everything else (including “Prince Valiant” which was rather boring for a 6 year old). It wasn’t until later that I realized that lameness has a certain agelessness.
PS I ended up marrying a Nancy, so I obviously didn’t associate the name with anything lame (honestly, honey….)
Very good, Juanito. Very good.
Creeepy…
Jeez, now I gotta leave all the lights on. Even creepier than the ones in the dream dance sequence in “S.O.B.”(but, without the promise of comedic balm to follow)…
Bizarre.
I recognize Nancy and Sluggo on top, of course, with L’il Abner, but who are the others? When did Lil’l Fidel Castro become a cartoon character?
Aieeee! Nancy and Sluggo have been beheaded!
They’re from “The Captain and the Kids,” AKA “The Katzenjammer Kids”: the characters are ‘the Captain’ and (IIRC) Hans and Fritz.
That’s The Captain and the Kids, aka The Katzenjammer Kids.
Nancy never bothered me all that much. No more than mute Henry, concussion happy Jiggs or ‘eyes ten times too large’ Dondi.
Nancy was a must read comic in my youth, so fastidiously and tightly drawn that Mr. Bushmiller would even draw lines of little dashes to show exactly where Nancy was looking. Though I remember reading one strip on June 6, 1966, I can’t remember what the joke was about, though I’m sure it had somethng to do with 6-6-66.
Not as creepy as the ventriloquist cover. For me it’s creepy if I use my imagination.
Remind me. Who’s the Fidel Castro look-alike at the top of the comic?
To unreal to be creepy for me. Nancy was one of those cartoons that was always the meh of meh. Never got the point of it. It wasn’t funny, the artistry was meh. I was never attracted to it enough to bother with it; seeing this cover would have done nothing to entice me to open the book up.
Man, I’ve ALWAYS hated Nancy, more than I can put into words. The art’s terrible, the writing is terrible, it’s just a comprehensively awful comic. But it’s like a zombie – somehow it STILL appears in the local paper (thankfully Sundays only now), despite many better comics having come and gone from the comics page in the meantime.
Just as long as neither one is named “Charlie.” Because no one wants a “Charlie-in-the-box.”
Never could stand Nancy or Dondi, even though I had to read them. Same way with some tv cartoons such as Mighty Mouse; they were cartoons so I had to watch them, even though they never left me feeling satisfied.
But Fritzi Ritz (Aunt Fritzi) more than makes up for the creepiness of Nancy and Sluggo just by showing up and looking hot. Sorry, I just realized how creepy this makes me look….
It’s Nancy’s nose that’s so disturbing. That little slit instead of nostrils. Deformities aren’t cute.
I haven’t read Nancy in years. But as a kid I recall her Aunt Fritzi being rather hawt, in a slinky, frowzy, Wilma-Deering-from-Buck-Rogers kinda way. At least that would explain Sluggo always being over at Nancy’s house.
As several pointed, out, “Fidel” is the Captain from katenjammer Kids. Now that was a weird freaking comic.
I could never figure out why this German family was in Africa (I guess now they were Boer settlers), why the Captain didn’t havea ship, and what all these people did for a living. And the violence was sometimes over the top. It was originally one of the very first comic strips, end in fact pre-dated comic strips as Max und Moritz, and was passed down to different cartoonists over the years. “Katzenjammer” means cat-noise and is slang for a hangover.
They got their comeuppance though, with the full Will Elder treatment in Mad Comics. Very very funny and very pre-comics code. Wish I could post a scan of it.
Oh, and the “Captain’s” buddy was “der Inspektor”. Now what was up with that? Police Inspector? Mine Inspector? Chicken Inspector? All he seemed to do was hang out with the captain, play checkers, smoke cigars and drink. And then there was the African “der Chief” but let’s not even go there.
rbj – I had exactly the same dislikes as a child. Nancy and Dondi were both in our daily paper, and even as a child I found Dondi horribly, horribly annoying.
Didn’t like the Woody Woodpecker animated cartoon, either. Still don’t.
rbj Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 9:31 am
Just as long as neither one is named “Charlie.” Because no one wants a “Charlie-in-the-box.”
Isle of Misfit Toys.
Hey, why weren’t you at Elf Practice???!!!!
The line I use almost daily with my girls (from Coach Comet) “I want to be your Pal – right? Right.”
The Katzenjammer Kids was set in the East African German colonies. That’s how long ago the strip was created. There was one heartbreaking* story arc where the Captain had hidden all the money he’d saved for years in a big urn – it was going to pay to have them all go back to Germany and get the h*** out of East Africa. The Kids ‘inadvertently’ burned the whole stash of marks – haha! That’s comedy, folks.
*For a given value of heartbreaking. Even as a kid myself, I always sympathized with the Captain. He was Mr. Wilson stuck in the tropics with no Mrs. Wilson and TWO Dennises.
Wasn’t “Mamma” his wife? I never figure that out either.
But about the money in the big vase? Your memory is playing you false. That is from the Will Elder parody “The Katchandhammer Kids”. (Mad #20 Feb 1955) I am looking at my copy right now. In retribution for that “prank”, the captain ties the boys to a railroad track and whips them bloody with a cat-o-nine-tails. I’d like to scan and post the story, but the lawyers would probably kill me.
“YAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH
Where’s the Brillo?? Must. Scour. Eyes.”
Use Nancy’s hair.
As a kid, I disliked “Nancy” so much that I could not look away from it. I had to read it every day, just so I could get annoyed at how lame it was.
Hal, I feel your pain. I deliberately avoid it every week in the Sunday comics, and inevitibly my eyes are drawn to it, and then I get mad at myself for looking at it (or, god forbid, actually reading it).
The one I hate the sight of nowadays is Doonesbury. But it’s too lame to actually read, even to experience the satisfaction of its lameness.
What I always loved about “Nancy & Sluggo” was the original cartoonist’s insistence on keeping everyone in the 1940s. I was reading this strip as a kid, in the 1970s and 80s, and Aunt Fritzi still dressed and kept her hair like one of the Andrews Sisters. And whenever you saw a phone, it was one of those heavy old bakelite numbers.
More recently, Aunt Fritzi’s updated her look and uses email. I think it was better frozen in time as before.
Wish it into the cornfield! Pleeeaaase, wish it into the cornfield!
Was it necessary to spring that on us?