Finding correspondences to the minimalist architecture of Mies van der Rohe, the essay calls Nancy "a complex amalgam of formal rules laid out by [its] designer."
The essay successively isolates and discusses the strip's individual formal elements (including the placement of word balloons, the level of the horizon line, the spotting of blacks, and panel shape and size) to demonstrate each codependent aspect of comics syntax.
[1] "How to Read Nancy" is an outgrowth of Karasik and Newgarden's lifelong interest in Bushmiller's work.
Newgarden had previously drawn "Love's Savage Fury," a four-page tribute to Nancy originally published in RAW Magazine v. 1 #8 in 1986 (also republished in The Best of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy), and the pair had assigned a Nancy-related assignment to students in a "Language of Comics" class that they co-taught in the 1980s at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
One example of student work from that class, cartoonist R. Sikoryak's "Ancy," was later published in Legal Action Comics v.