First compilation of the newspaper comic strip re-launched by Olivia Jaimes in 2018.

I grew up with the original run by Ernest Bushmiller; i also love to play Five Card Nancy (https://www.scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/nancy/index.html)

Jaimes has modernized the character - Nancy's in a robotics club and hates to be separately from her smart phone - while staying true to Nancy's stubbornness and surreality. I had heard good things about the reboot. It was fun, i might even try to follow it online now. ( )

This reboot of a century-old strip which had lost its way after he death of Ernie Bushmiller, its most noted creator, is pretty successful. Nancy and Sluggo advance into this century with their major preoccupations being such aspects of modernity as social media, streaming services, computer bugs,and the internet world in general, though there are also a good number of childhood concerns which would have been familiar generations ago. Like many contemporary cartoons, these struck me as occasionally brilliantly hilarious, but also with too many headscratchers. I admit that I am not that familiar with social media and some of the other concerns of the youth of today, but some of the 'toons involved didn't seem to really concern themselves with those subjects. An interview with the artist/author is appended which I enjoyed and helped put the reboot into context. ( )

Full disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book from NetGalley.

I’ve never read any of the classic Nancy comics, but her look is iconic. I feel like I could identify a Nancy comic from across the room by the shape of Nancy’s head alone. The fact that those comics were ubiquitous enough to become iconic but passé enough that I’d never read any of them is a fascinating contradiction.

Nancy is one of a handful of undead syndicated comics, kept running by a series of artists after the original artist died. It’s the sort of thing that newspapers carry by default for the sort of people who still get newspapers and read the comics section. That’s why the handoff to Olivia Jaimes was such a shock to the system; after decades of comfortable, predictable irrelevancy, Nancy was suddenly reentering the pop culture discussion and getting read and shared by young people.

One of the most interesting things about Jaimes is that she wanted to bring Nancy back to her original spirit while updating the trappings of the strip for modern times. Her predecessor had turned Nancy into a parade of cutesiness and made the strip toothless and unfunny. Jaimes’ vision of Nancy was as a stubborn little girl who is always scheming, in a strip packed full of absurd jokes that sometimes get a little meta.

The most famous Nancy image from Jaimes’ reign so far, “Sluggo is Lit“, is a meta joke about the cartoonist not wanting to do a strip and providing previews of upcoming stories, but it’s also a poke at the sort of people upset that Jaimes is updating Nancy with modern sensibilities. The only reason that anyone is talking about Nancy comics in 2019 is because Jaimes made them resonant for our times.

This collection includes strips from Jaimes’ first year of running Nancy. It has several laugh out loud moments throughout, and I find myself wanting to read more of the daily strip. There isn’t an overarching storyline to the collection. Instead, the strips are mostly just episodic hi-jinks or one-off jokes. Nancy does slowly but surely learn more about building robots in her robotics club, but that’s more about the comedic potential of Nancy building and controlling something mechanical.

If you’re looking for a good laugh from a strip that feels “relatable” without pandering, then you should definitely check out Olivia Jaimes’ Nancy.

Originally published at Full of Words. ( )

Amusing. After seeing her taking up space on the comic pages in newspapers for decades without generating even a chuckle, I never thought I would seek out, much less enjoy, a collection of Nancy strips. Nice. ( )