I finally got around to buying a blank deck of playing cards and making a deck for Five Card Nancy. The instructions for making a deck and playing the game are over on Scott McCloud’s website.
I haven’t actually played by those rules yet. So far I just use the deck almost like Tarot or Oblique Strategies, pulling a single card for fun, or doing a “past, present, future” draw.
Most of those panels were pulled from my beloved copies of the Nancy collections published by Fantagraphics. (So far, only volume one, volume two, and volume three.) These are gorgeous books, and sadly, if I’m not mistaken, out-of-print. Ernie Bushmiller’s strip has given me so much comfort over the years. When my second son was born, it was all I could read — now he absconds to his bunk with them to read before bed.
The old joke is, “it’s easier to read Nancy than to not read it,” but the strip is actually much more artful and sophisticated than you’d think. (For more, see the book How To Read Nancy.)
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Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.
