From Mudpie to Muppets to Nancy to children's books

By Scott Benjamin

The highly abridged encyclopedia of children’s book artist Guy Gilchrist, who was born in the Winsted section of Winchester, lived in West Hartford and Avon, graduated from Avon High School, started his career writing funny animal comics at Weekly Reader in Middletown and sponsored the Mudpie Cartoon Invitational Golf Tournament in Canton, where he resided before moving to Nashville.

BUSHMILLER, ERNIE: Although Gilchrist got to know some of the legendary cartoonists from Connecticut - and even invited some of them to play in his charity golf tournament - he never met Stamford’s Bushmiller, who created Nancy in 1938 – as an offshoot from Fritzi Ritz, Nancy’s aunt, a comic strip that had begun in 1922 with Larry Whittington.

Gilchrist was working on children’s books - he has now published nearly 50 of them –when his literary agent, David Hendin, inquired in 1995 about being the cartoonist for Nancy, along with his younger brother, Brad Gilchrist. Jerry Scott – known for co-creating Baby Blues and Zits – was stepping down after 12 years from the adventures of Nancy and Sluggo.

Gilchrist told Patch.com in a phone interview that he declined, saying that his style didn’t fit the mold that Bushmiller had established until his death in 1982. Bushmiller’s work has been displayed daily since February 2015 at www.gocomics.com in “Nancy Classics.”

One of Gilchrist’s friends declared, “Are you out of your mind?” since a syndicated comic strip for United Features was a golden opportunity.

Gilchrist drew some audition comic strips and his agent submitted them and even though the syndicate said they thought they had a successor they anointed him and his brother to carry the franchise.

“Even in 1995, newspapers were on the decline,” Gilchrist recalled. “Nancy was losing readers and the way the tide was going it probably wasn’t going to last much longer. I thought I would probably do it for six months, even though we had a three year contract.”

“I had to learn to draw in a different style,” he noted.

In 2017 – just months before Gilchrist stopped writing Nancy - a book was published analyzing Bushmiller’s drawings – “How To Read Nancy: The Elements Of Comics in Three Easy Panels,” by Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden, (Fantagraphics Illustrated, 276 pages).

The Comics Journal stated that it was “the best book written about comics. No question.”

“I wish that book had been available when I started with Nancy,” Gilchrist related.

“But I am a student of life and I like to learn new things,” he explained. “It was great to take on the challenge and grow as a cartoonist.”

Bushmiller’s work has been called “simple.”

In fact, Wikipedia has stated that comic theorist Scott McCloud described the essence of Nancy – calling Bushmiller’s work “a landmark achievement. A comic so simply drawn it can be reduced to the size of a postage stamp.”

Gilchrist said, “There is a difference between ‘simple’ and ‘un-complex,’ What he would do is put in the least amount of things into a panel to emphasize the impact of the joke.”

He said he tried to honor that legacy.

“I wanted to be honest to Ernie’s work,” Gilchrist explained. “I also wanted people to recognize that Nancy was eight years old. And I wanted to connect with as many people as possible. She and Sluggo were on skateboards and reading comic books. I never wanted to have them doing things that would require spending a lot of money because there were children reading the strip that couldn’t relate to that. I had them skipping stones and climbing trees, things that were fun and didn’t cost anything.”

Who reads Nancy?

“I always wrote for everyone that would be reading the newspaper or going to the Internet,” Gilchrist said. “I wanted to connect with all ages and hope that each member of the family would read it as they passed the newspaper around the house.”

For 12 years, under Scott, the comic strip had been about Nancy and Sluggo with no reference to Aunt Fritzi.

Gilchrist reintroduced Fritzi to the comic strip, but strictly in the role of Nancy’s guardian.

“With a sudden change, it would take months or years for your audience to react,” Gilchrist explained.

In the mid-to-late 1990s most people read Nancy from a newspaper without the option of flipping through Go Comics or the social media to read yesterday’s strip that they had missed.

Although he never met Bushmiller, Gilchrist had a rapport with Ralph Carlson, who had been Bushmiller’s personal assistant. Carlson reported that Bushmiller’s two sisters enjoyed reading Gilchrist’s version of Nancy.

Through the years Gilchrist paid tribute to Bushmiller by making reference to him in the comic strip.

After re-establishing Fritzi as the guardian, he said that there “were some things on my mind” as he modernized the comic strip for the 21st century.

“Why did Sluggo live by himself?” . . . “Where did Sluggo get money to buy food? Those issues had not been addressed in the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s.”

In 2013 he answered that by doing an extended segment on how Sluggo arrived in Three Rocks and was adopted by two truck drivers.

Added Gilchrist, “In those early years, I never wanted to develop a romance and have it take away from the concept of what Friizi and Nancy had been doing. I also wanted to ensure that Nancy was the star of the comic strip.”

“Aunt Fritzi was a mother figure,” said Gilchrist. “But what did Fritzi do for a living?”

He turned her into a newspaper music columnist.

In December 2012 he did a “Phil Fumble reboot.”

Fumble had been Fritzi’s boyfriend eons earlier in the Sunday Fritzi and the Phil Fumble comic strips.

Gilchrist ended his work on Nancy with a lengthy story that culminated in their wedding on February 18, 2018 as they marched off listening to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” Gilchrist’s favorite Beach Boys song.

Less than two months later Olivia Jaimes took over Nancy after United Features Syndicate ran some reruns of Gilchrist’s strips. Jaimes has updated the comic to have Nancy using a Smartphone and taking robotics classes.

Gilchrist said, “I did it for more than 22 years, and I initially thought that it wouldn’t last more than six months.”

CONNECTICUT’S DIVERSITY: Ten years ago, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Hartford), who was then representing Connecticut’s Fifth Congressional District, told CTNewsJunkie: “A lot of people in Washington think that Connecticut is one big suburb of New York. I’d like them to come here to see how diverse our state is. In my district alone, if you take a day to travel from Lakeville to Waterbury to Simsbury, you’ll think you’ve traveled to three different regions of the country.”

Gilchrist said when he was traveling through Fairfield County’s Gold Coast in the 1970s to visit and display his comic strips at the National Cartoon Museum in Greenwich – a town that has mansions that rival Lodge Manor from Archie comics - “it wasn’t as though I was in a different state, it was as though I was in a different country.”

He added, “Connecticut is extremely diverse. Tennessee also is diverse.”

DAILY COMIC STRIP: Hartford native and Trinity College graduate Jim Murray, who won a Pulitzer Prize in Commentary in 1990 for his syndicated sports column for The Los Angeles Times, once stated, “The trouble with writing a column is, it’s like running a railroad. You have to keep the stock rolling. You can never step back and admire or even take stock of what you have done. Because you’re on to the next one (Jim Murray: An Autobiography, 1993, Macmillan Publishing Company, 268 pages).”

However, Murray only produced four columns a week.

How about writing 365 comic strips each year?

“It becomes your entire life,” said Gilchrist, 64, of the demands in writing a syndicated comic strip. “You are constantly thinking about it.”

“You had to do it for 365 days a year, and you hoped to have thousands of ideas that you could pick from,” he said. “You looked at things that were happening in your own life and things you read about and try to develop it into material for the strip.”

Sometimes a reader would contact him about some gag from the previous day that would be appropriate for the following comic strip. However, he was already 60, 90 or 120 days ahead.

GILCHRIST, BRAD: Today Dan Haar is an associate editor and business columnist for CT Hearst, writing about how Gov. Ned Lamont (D-Greenwich) is trying to revive Connecticut’s stagnant economy.

However, in August 1981 he was a photographer for the Hartford Courant and at the Lambieck Comiclopedia web site there is the picture he took then of the Gilchrist brothers as they embarked on their daily comic strip on the Muppets, which Jim Henson had turned into an icon through their appearances on Sesame Street on PBS and a feature movie. The strip, which the brothers did until 1986, appeared in about 660 newspapers.

In addition to working with his older brother on The Muppets and through the early years of Nancy, Brad Gilchrist, who still lives in Connecticut, currently does “At The Green House” - a comic and blog about the everyday joy of growing greener. He also has done the CT Fan comic and written books for Looney Tunes and Tiny Toon Adventures.

HENSON, JIM: Gilchrist remarked, “He was very forward thinking and he was ahead of his time.”

“He was the greatest boss you could ever imagine,” he added. “He could sense your ability and he wouldn’t tell you what to do.”

“He gave you so much freedom and he was such a talented leader, that you never want to do anything to question his faith,” Gilchrist related. “We wanted to please him. We wanted to do our very best.”

Why have the Muppets been so popular?

Gilchrist said part of the reason is that it is, “Us against the world.”

“They shore each other up,” he added “They are strong as a group. It touches our heart.”

INTERNET: “As newspapers have continued to decline more people were accessing Nancy online,” said Gilchrist.

“The last two years [2016 to 2018] it was many more people finding Nancy through the social media and Go Comics,” he said.

Nashville Arts Magazine reported in 2015 that Nancy was in 79 newspapers and overall had 57 million readers each day in 80 countries.

Would it be more difficult if he was starting today as a cartoonist?

“It’s different,” Gilchrist related. “It isn’t any more challenging. There had been a decline in newspapers before I got the Muppets strip in the 1980s.”

“I think there are opportunities if you use your determination and imagination,” he said.

“When I started you presented your work in person,” Gilchrist continued. “Now you usually you just send a link.”

“For example, with television, radio and the movies had to change,” he explained in regards to the need to reinvest yourself.

“What doesn’t change is the need for advertising revenue,” Gilchrist said. “You need content that will attract readers and generate that revenue.”

KINDNESS ALWAYS: In e-mail messages, Gilchrist’s departing salutation is, “Kindness always.”

Below that he states, "Why do I draw so fast? Because I can't wait to see you smile!”

LANTZ, WALTER: Gilchrist never met the legendary creator of Woody Woodpecker, who even had a television show where he invited the audience into his studio.

However, at age 10 he sent some of his cartoons to him and received a reply stating that he had “a lot of talent” and with hard work could become “a great cartoonist.”

Gilchrist remarked, “It changed my life.”

MINOR LEAGUE BASEBALL: Gilchrist created to logos for several teams, including the former Norwich Navigators and New Britain Rock Cats in Connecticut.

A Red Sox fan, he said he was disappointed that they recently traded outfielder Andrew Benintendi, who he saw hit a home run during Benintendi’s brief minor league career.

NASHVILLE: “The main reason I moved to here was I was getting more involved in music,” said Gilchrist who has lived in the Anioch neighborhood since 2006. “I was coming to Nashville so much that it made sense to live here.”

He regularly performs country rock concerts.

Said Gilchrist, “You can tell stories through cartoons and through music, and at times I didn’t know which of those was going to be first choice with me.”

NEW PROJECTS: Gilchrist did the drawings for an e-book last fall, “Monster Dance” (Madeleine Editions, 2020), which addresses the anxiety that some children have with the pandemic.

It was coordinated by Los Angeles physician Karen Tsai, written by Paris-based children’s author Eva Lou and narrated by actor Denis O’Hare.

He also has recently released “40 years of his Mudpie” – a collection of his comics of the kid cat, which includes behind the scenes information.

SCHOOL VISITS: “What has helped me is doing talks at thousands of schools across the country and trying out new ideas to understand what will work and what won’t work,” Gilchrist said. “If you lose touch with your audience it is a ticket to oblivion.”

WALKER, MORT: The noted cartoonist was not only the writer and artist for Beetle Bailey and the writer for Hi and Lois, but founded the National Cartoon Museum, which began in Stamford in the mid-1970s and then a short time later moved to Greenwich. Walker lived in both of those municipalities through the years. The museum is now part of a library and museum at Ohio State University.

Gilchrist used to frequent the museum, would substitute for some of the cartoonists when they couldn’t do their chalk talks and even had a small display area.

It was a referral from Walker, who died in 2018, that helped land the Muppets comic strip for Gilchrist and his brother.

“Early on, he told me, ‘You’re pretty good,’ “Gilchrist recalled.

“I credit him with making my career,” he added. “He has been responsible for the careers of hundreds of cartoonists. He was the kindest, most giving person.”