Ernie Bushmiller (1905–1982) was an American cartoonist best known for creating the daily comic strip Nancy, which has remained in print since 1938. After completing the eighth grade, Bushmiller dropped out of school and began working as a copy boy at the New York World. There, he ran errands, observed his cartoonist colleagues, and eventually picked up illustration assignments such as lettering speech balloons and designing crossword puzzles. In 1925, he was given the chance to take over Larry Whittington’s comic strip Fritzi Ritz, which evolved into the long-running strip Nancy.
Denis Kitchen is a cartoonist, writer, and publisher. In 1969, after the success of his self-published Mom’s Homemade Comics, Kitchen launched Kitchen Sink Press to publish his own work and the work of other underground cartoonists. In its thirty-year run, Kitchen Sink published work by both new and older cartoonists including R. Crumb, Alice Kominsky-Crumb, Will Eisner, Milton Caniff, Charles Burns, Alan Moore, M. K. Brown, and Ernie Bushmiller. A monograph of Kitchen’s own work, The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen, was published in 2010 by Dark Horse Comics and was nominated for both Harvey and Eisner Awards. Originally from Wisconsin, he now lives in Western Massachusetts.
