If you were alive in twentieth-century America, you knew Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy-and this new collection assembles some of the greatest strips featuring the much-loved cartoon icon and her pug-nosed companion, Sluggo.

The newspaper cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller once admitted that "all my characters are conceived in desperation." Nancy was no exception. She was the niece of the star of his other strip, Fritzi Ritzi, and meant to serve as a throwaway gag character.

But Nancy could not be contained: Within a few years, Bushmiller's strip had been renamed for her, and she had begun her ascent into the pantheon of cartooning greats. Nancy, along with on-and-off boyfriend Sluggo, delivered absurd laughs to readers for decades, all rendered in Bushmiller's distinctive line that cartoonist Denis Kitchen once called "geometric perfection.