Bare Minimum comics
Nancy and Sluggo are still around today, which slightly lummoxes me as the strip has always seemed to carry minimalism way too far. The story goes that Ernie Bushmiller had an assortment of Nancy and Sluggo rubber stamps made up, and he would pick a few, press them on an ink pad and smack them on the page, ink in a few word balloons and be done for the day. This isn't as unlikely as you might think. Mac Raboy's drawings of Captain Marvel Jr were cut and pasted all over the pages of other artists, and Jack Burnley's Starman repeated the same five or six poses from story to story (and sometimes repeated themselves within the same story). Of course, with those two artists, there was a lot of care to detail and anatomy in their drawing, while Bushmiller's were simple icons a step above stick figures, but the principle is the same.
Of course, Nancy and Sluggo began as minor characters in FRITZI RITZ (which started in 1922), which they gradually took over in the sort of coup that comics undergo sometimes. The same thing happened to WASH TUBBS becoming CAPTAIN EASY, for example.This is from November 16, 1941, and there's more craftsmanship here than meets the eye at first. The very first panel, with the little inset of Phil running, is so economical. We see Fritzi on the phone and (to us)she is still talking while Phil already has his coat on and is running down the street. He's so eager, in fact, that his little inset overlaps into the next panel. It's a tiny moment, but I love spotting little bits of storytelling art like that.This strip also brings up the convention that comics women are nearly always drawn in a more realistic and attractive way than the men are. This even extends to funny animals, for some reason. Check out how Bushmiller takes care to make Fritzi and the store mannequins such babes, while Phil and Ronnie are goofballs. Phil also seems to be foreshadowing the Simpsons' trait of having just an outline of hair on top of the head.