HURRICANE NANCY
The Work and Life of Nancy Burton
(Seattle: Fantagraphics Underground, 2024)
One of the earliest underground cartoonists, Burton contributed to many notable publications including The East Village Other, Gothic Blimp Works, and It Ain’t Me, Babe under the pen names Panzika, Nancy Kalish, and most famously, Hurricane Nancy, before she abandoned art in 1971.
Burton began making art again in 2009. Since then she’s produced more than five hundred images, a selection of which are included in the book. She has been included in The Complete Wimmen’s Comix collection, and was one of the cartoonists profiled in Drew Friedman’s Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix.
Nancy and I first met when I assembled the Oral History of the Wimmen’s Comix Collective and I subsequently interviewed her for The Comics Journal. We remained in touch and after I proposed this idea, we conducted the long interview which is included in the book, where she goes into detail about her life and talks publicly about why she stopped drawing and why she started again. I made the decision to present her work without cleaning it up and without commentary. The interview provides a lot of context to her work and life and the events of the era, but hopefully people have the chance to consider her art with little information and find the meaning.
The work here was created during the early years of the underground comics movement, and one can see how Nancy’s work changed and evolved over the years, but hopefully it provides some context for both readers and scholars interested in the period
Book Reviews
“Overall, this collection presents a decade-spanning overview of an artist whose career has one foot in underground comix and the other in poster art but who has yet to gain significant recognition within either sphere. Burton's entire career is contextualized through the inclusion of the introduction and interview, and the collection demonstrates the fluid divide between underground comix and other contemporary artistic movements, making it a valuable addition for scholars wishing to broaden discussions of female underground artists and the nature of the underground comix movement itself.”
-Cassia Hayward-Fitch, International Journal of Comic Art
“Hurricane Nancy is a true testament to cartooning, a look back on a body of work that dizzies the reader with its sheer creative ecstasy…No other comic I’ve read this year has made me want to draw comics as badly as Hurricane Nancy. These are beautiful vulgar comics, cartoons for adults ferociously mannered, filled at every corner with messy, perfect stippling.”
-Helen Chazan, The Comics Journal
“At its heart, this is work coming straight out of the Sixties counterculture at its very nexus on the Lower East Side of New York City. These are highly uninhibited flowing lines, oozing and spilling across the page about protest, outrage, sex and simply being alive.”