Beckett and "Nancy," together again

At least two publications this week fell for a nine-year-old high-concept gag: a supposed literary correspondence between existentialist par excellence Samuel Beckett and the original author of the comic strip "Nancy," Ernie Bushmiller. Such was Beckett's enthusiasm for Bushmiller's deadpan style, we are led to believe, that in the early 1950s he sent the cartoonist several ideas for strips.

Editor and Publisher magazine "broke" the news, drawing on a blog item by a cartoonist and writer named R.C. Harvey, and a blogger for the Seattle paper The Stranger picked it up. Trouble is, the whole story is bogus, having originated in a 1999 issue of The Hermenaut, the late, lamented Boston-based magazine published by Josh Glenn -- in the "Fake Authenticity" issue, no less. "The Bushmiller/Beckett Letters" were written, in fact, by A.S. Hamrah and illustrated by R. Sikoryak. After some desultory words of thanks, here's how "Bushmiller" responded to some of "Beckett's" proposals:

I don’t know how well they’re going to work. I think the problem you’re having, Sam, is the same problem any literary man might have. You’re not setting up the gags visually and you’re rushing to the snapper. It seems to me you’ve got the zingers right there at the beginning, in panel No. 1, and although I have to admit you got Nancy and Sluggo in some crackerjack predicaments, I don’t see how they got there.

For instance, putting Nancy and Sluggo in the garbage cans is a good gag, but in my opinion, you can’t have them in there for all three panels. How did they get there? Same thing when you had them buried in the sand. I like to do beach gags, but I don’t think that having Nancy buried up to her waist in the first two panels and then up to her neck in the third one is adequately explained, and I’ve been at this game for a while now. Also, why would Sluggo be facing in the opposite direction when he’s talking to her?

Alerted by amused comics bloggers to its own crackerjack predicament, Editor and Publisher somewhat lamely updated its story to say the tale is "apparently a hoax," while The Stranger's Paul Constant manfully calls himself "the stupid credulous … hack of the day." (Hey, it happens.) In his original item, Constant posted this real "Nancy" panel, which hints at where the idea for the classic faux letters came from: