This Week in Nancy: "Be E(A)RNEST, DANG IT!"

I'm feeling compelled to write about Olivia Jaimes' Nancy reboot every week, so here goes.

In their exhaustive, detailed, and insightful book, How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels, Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden perform a detailed analysis of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy strip from Aug 8, 1948 in order to get at just what makes Bushmiller a master of the "gag." They examine the strip in whole and in parts--the images, the text, the word-ballon placement, the spacing, the background, the props, and as they write, the"details, details, details"--to work toward their conclusion that to make "good comics" one must understand "the hard-won language of all the great twentieth-century practitioners, a language exemplified by the clear, unambiguous example of Ernie Bushmiller" (158).

Does Olivia Jaimes' know Bushmiller's language? Can she speak it? Lots of people say "no." I say, "not so fast." As Karasik and Newgarden tell us, Bushmiller published his first comics as a teenager, and by the time he changed the name of his strip Fritzi Ritz to Nancy around June 11, 1938, he had been drawing Fritzi for more than ten years (58-59). And he didn't have Ernie Bushmiller as a guide. Nobody knows how long Olivia Jaimes has been making comics, but we do know that she has fifty years of Bushmiller's Nancy to contend with.

So what is she doing with this history? To my eye, she is "working backwards" with it. That is, Karasik and Newgarden write that Bushmiller often wrote the "gag" first. Bushmiller says "I draw the last panel first and work back toward the beginning, which is the opposite of the way you read (I hope)" (66). I don't know if Jaimes ever starts with the last panel, but today's strip seems most interesting if a reader considers the last panel first.

We end with a pun, a pun aimed directly at the new Nancy's critics. "You Hooligans, Be Earnest, Dang It!" says a crotchety-looking old guy, half out of the frame, shaking his fist at Nancy and Sluggo. Be Earnest . . . Be Ernest . . . Be Ernie . . . he might as well be saying. Nancy dismisses him with an emotionless "Nah." Here's the whole strip.

In the first panel, the old man looks toward Sluggo and Nancy and starts with a cliched "Kids these days." In the second panel, we see that he was concealing a mailbox from our view, so his claim that kids today "don't know how to mail letters" makes some sense. (I can't say the same for his "or write checks"). We see Nancy holding a letter; she and Sluggo look sleepy. The old man's speech balloon fills the top of the panel (the old man himself is off panel) with a long tail, as he explains that these two kids are exhibiting "an air of ironic detachment." Jaimes is trolling the trolls. She has set up a false dichotomy between the "earnest"  old man and the ironically detached kids, Nancy and Sluggo. The joke is on the reader. Are you an earnest Bushmiller purist or an ironic fan of the Nancy reboot? The battle grounds are staked.

But the dichotomy is false. Jaimes has been creating Nancy for less than a month.  She knows the Nancy vocabulary, but she only deploys small parts of it. Look at the balloon placement in the second panel. It's hideous and distorted. Or is it just a riff on the precision of Bushmiller's balloons? Is the weird inconsistent perspective on purpose, "on purpose," or neither?

On Monday, April 23, Jaimes anticipates Friday's old man with the picture in the "Age-Me App" that apparently allows you to "See Yourself Old." Jaimes has something invested in having Nancy and Sluggo use social media and apps. "NANCEE 22" gives the app 1/5 stars. Is this a comment on the online comments about Nancy? Is it?

On Tuesday, April 24, Jaimes breaks out Bushmiller's "Nancy sees Sluggo talking to another girl and gets jealous" trope. Only this time, Jaimes reveals that Sluggo's interest in the nameless girl is only because her parents "have accounts for HBO and Hulu." Sluggo must be dreaming of watching Game of Thrones. 

On Wednesday, April 25, Jaimes gives us Nancy lying in a dark room. Is that the voice of Aunt Fritzi?

Is this comic an homage to this one? Look at the blanket. But also look at Nancy drop the phone on her own face. She looks like a cyclops. That's funny.

On Thursday, April 26, we get Sluggo looking at Nancy's computer in panel one. In panel two, he seems inordinately angry that Nancy has "logged five hundred hours" on a game but hasn't "beaten any levels" yet. What the heck is she doing. In panel three, Nancy tells Sluggo "Oh I love that game." Sluggo must be wondering why she's so bad at it again. The gutter between the third and fourth panel shifts the scene. Nancy is now in bed, and we see the gag. "Nothing overheats my computer faster." We even see three (three!! Bushmiller's favorite number) little heat waves emanating from the laptop that sits atop Nancy's blanket. She plays the game only to overheat her computer to warm up her bed. Bushmiller's Nancy could get behind that logic.

 Of course, Bushmiller's Nancy would just invite some pets into her bed.

I'll end with a question, Does today's future, except for the "Earnest," know what bebop records are?