He ran errands for the staff cartoonists and was given occasional illustration assignments, including a Sunday feature by Harry Houdini.

[3] Bushmiller had already been producing a comic strip for the New York Evening Graphic titled Mac the Manager.

In 1931, they headed for Hollywood, where Bushmiller wrote gags for Harold Lloyd's Movie Crazy,[7] continuing to draw Fritzi Ritz at the same time.

Tom Smucker, writing in The Village Voice, observed: Bushmiller's strong point was never the content of his comic strip's jokey plots—a friend once described him as "a moron on an acid trip."

That's because they were just a vehicle for the controlled and brilliant manipulation of repetition and variety that gave the strip its unique visual rhythm and composition.

Bushmiller choreographed his familiar formal elements inside the tightest frame of any major strip, and that helped make it the most beautiful, as a whole, of any in the papers.

[10]As Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden noted in their essay, "How to Read Nancy": Ernie Bushmiller had the hand of an architect, the mind of a silent film comedian, and the soul of an accountant.

His formulaic approach to humor beautifully revealed the essence of what a perfect gag is all about – balance, symmetry, economy.

His gags have the abstract feel of math and Nancy was, in fact, a mini-algebra equation masquerading as a comic strip for close to 50 years.

[12]In 1979, Bushmiller was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, but he continued to produce the strip with the help of assistants Will Johnson and Al Plastino.

Art-book publisher Harry N. Abrams commissioned twenty newspaper cartoonists, including Bushmiller, to create a museum-quality lithograph.

[16] Nancy remains a recognised and popular character, drawn by other artists since Bushmiller's death, most recently by the pseudonymous 'Olivia Jaimes'.