Three Rocks

"""As the curator of the fictional Bushmiller Museum in Altadena, California, I was thrilled to learn from reading Three Rocks that there's a fictional one in Stamford, Connecticut, too!""--Tom Gammill ""Bill Griffith is a master of pen-and-ink graphic storytelling. This delightful book is, first and foremost, a well-researched biography of Ernie Bushmiller, creator of Nancy and one of the unsung geniuses of the comics business. It is also a thought-provoking discourse on the inner dynamics of cartooning and its relationship to fine art. The narrative alternates deftly between realistically rendered scenes of Bushmiller's life and career to flashbacks, future fantasies, dream sequences, clever asides by Nancy herself, and informative insights from the author. It is a thoroughly entertaining journey into Bushmillerland that is destined to take its place among the select group of classic graphic novels.""--Brian Walker ""For many years, I've devoured Bill Griffith's work. It's always inspiring and engrossing. As it never fails to do, Griffith's brilliance and consummate drawing chops shine through. Three Rocks is amazing!""--Emil Ferris ""I inhaled this book. If there's one Nancy mystery greater than the peculiar, clean hum of the strip itself, it's what Ernie Bushmiller, the man, was actually like. In this last, best volume of a three-book talismanic paean to the inspirations that have sustained and formed him for the past half century, underground comix legend Bill Griffith grafts all the real messiness of life--research, anecdotes, and interviews with those who knew Bushmiller--to perfect examples of the distilled graphic haiku of the Connecticut Zen master of the comic strip. The result, quite simply, is a page-turning, standard-setting, must-have work of biographical art. Two words: Three Rocks. Five stars!""--Chris Ware ""If you stare deeply enough into the bottomless abyss of black dots that serve as the eyes of Nancy and Sluggo, would you live to tell the tale? Well, Bill Griffith has. And the tale he tells is a complex, peculiar, and funny graphic biography of Ernie Bushmiller, creator of the brilliantly strange (and strangely brilliant) Nancy and Sluggo (as well as Fritzi Ritz and Phil Fumble). As the widest-ranging cartoon chronicler of American absurdity in our time, Bill Griffith has topped himself. This is an instant comic-strip classic!""--Matt Groening"