Nancy Stole the Spotlight. Now Meet the Man Who Created Her.

You probably know Nancy. You might even recognize Sluggo. But if someone asked who created the comic strip, there is a good chance you’d draw a blank. That’s the strange legacy of Ernie Bushmiller. He created one of America’s most recognizable newspaper comic strips, yet somehow became almost invisible behind his own creation. Unlike Charles M. Schulz, whose name is practically inseparable from Peanuts, Bushmiller became the guy behind the name on the comic page.

That is beginning to change. A Morning with Ernie Bushmiller brings the cartoonist back into the spotlight with a fictionalized look at Bushmiller in 1976, wrestling with creative doubt while trying to come up with four new Nancy gags. The play is being presented at the Mark O’Donnell Theater in Brooklyn, New York, giving audiences a chance to meet the man behind the little girl they may have known for decades without ever knowing his name.

There is also a great cartoon heist buried in the history. Bushmiller took over Fritzi Ritz in 1925, and Nancy arrived as a supporting character in 1933. She became so popular that she gradually took over the strip, which was renamed Nancy in 1938. Bushmiller created the strip, and then his own character stole the title. He spent roughly 57 years drawing the Fritzi Ritz/Nancy feature, including about 44 years with Nancy as its official name. Talk about a hostile takeover, only the new boss had a black bob and a comic-strip salary.

Bushmiller’s genius was making complicated decisions look ridiculously simple. He often started with the final panel, or “snapper,” and then worked backward, figuring out exactly how to get Nancy, Sluggo or another character into position for the punchline. Even the scenery had a job description. As discussed in Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, he often drew exactly three identical, nondescript rocks whenever Nancy was outdoors, giving readers enough information to know where they were without letting the background compete with the joke.

His peculiar attention to detail did not seem to extend to Wall Street. Despite becoming wealthy over his long career, Bushmiller apparently had little interest in following the broader stock market. The one company he closely followed and invested heavily in was Tootsie Roll, which may be one of the more appropriate investment choices ever made by a cartoonist who spent his life thinking about tiny things that delivered a big payoff.

Eventually, people began looking beneath the apparent simplicity of Nancy. In How to Read Nancy, Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden famously dissected a single three-panel strip, examining its composition, lettering, characters, timing and visual structure. The joke that took seconds to read turned out to contain enough carefully engineered machinery to keep comics people studying it for years.

That’s the part that makes Bushmiller’s story so good. He spent decades creating a comic that looked effortless, only for later generations to discover just how deliberate that simplicity was. The ordinary reader saw a quick gag. Cartoonists saw technique. Scholars saw structure. And somewhere along the way, Ernie Bushmiller became much more interesting than the four little panels he was trying to make look easy.

Now a play is putting his name back in front of the creation that made him famous while somehow hiding him from the public.

Nancy became the star. Bushmiller became the mystery. After all these years, the creator is finally getting top billing.