Is this the best Nancy strip ever? 

Olivia Jaimes has written what is perhaps the greatest Nancy comic ever, and it is published on January 20, 2019. 

The comic uses a regular trope of the Bushmiller years in which Nancy reaches for a cookie jar and is caught be Aunt Fritzi.

In the foreground of panel one, we have a refrigerator with a cookie jar on top. Nancy peers from the kitchen into the living room, where Aunt Fritzi sits on the couch reading the newspaper. We see Nancy from behind and from mid-torso up. We do not see her eyes, but based on her head position, we can see that she is looking into the living room to see if Aunt Fritzi is watching her. Jaimes has set up the joke, a joke that was an Ernie Bushmiller staple (and more broadly, a comic staple): Nancy will come up with an ingenious scheme to reach the cookie jar. Aunt Fritzi will discover Nancy with her hand in the cookie jar. Nancy will be punished. 

Panel two supplies the means for Nancy. A ladder appears on the right side of the panel and Nancy is nowhere to be seen. Look at the geometry of this panel. The left third of the panel gives us the rectangle of the refrigerator. The center third gives us another rectangle, the doorway between kitchen and living room, through which we can see Aunt Fritzi on the couch. The truncated triangle of the ladder takes up the right third of the panel, with the ladders supports dividing the triangle into three four-sided shapes. The panel is crowded. We only see the top two-thirds of the refrigerator and of the ladder. We can see the living room floor but not the kitchen floor. A foreshortened oval cookie jar sits atop the refrigerator. Jaimes has left more open space in the top of the panel than one might expect. Note, too, that the refrigerator and the ladder butt up against the left and right frame of the panel. We do not see the back of the refrigerator and we see less of the right side of the ladder than of the left. And Jaimes has set up a spacial problem. The ladder is too far away from the refrigerator to aid Nancy in reaching the cookie jar. 

Nancy takes advantage of the open space at the top in panel three. We see the same view in panel three: refrigerator with cookie jar, doorway framing Fritzi, and ladder. But now, Nancy stands atop the ladder in profile. Her upper body, her arms, and her head cross into the gutter (the white space between panels) and part of her face extends into the next panel. Nancy breaks the barrier of panel three, of the gutter between panel three and four, and panel four. In the process, she changes our understanding of how the panels relate to one another. We unthinkingly assume that each panel of the comic has been giving us the same point of view of the kitchen over a series of sequential movements. But now we see that Nancy, standing in the extreme right of panel three is also standing to the left of panel four. She is behind the refrigerator. The implied (but undrawn) wall behind the refrigerator (whose refrigerator is not against a wall?) does not exist. Nancy reaches into the left side of panel four with her hands. We see the result of this action in panel four. Two motion lines show us that she has used the ladder to reach the cookie jar and to throw it from its heretofore unreachable perch atop the refrigerator. The cookie jar flies through the air in the top of the panel. A small part of the cookie jar even crosses into the gutter at the top of panel four. Importantly, the jar flies above the doorway so that Aunt Fritzi cannot see what Nancy is doing. But who will catch the thrown cookie jar? 

Nancy will, of course, in panel four. But stay with Nancy in panel three for a moment. Notice that she has anchored herself with her left leg along and the right edge of panel three. She leans so far on top of the ladder that she should fall. Most of her left foot and part of her left leg, though, is obscured by the panel line and the gutter. It’s a three-dimensional joke in a two-dimensional space. The way her skirt and upper-body exist in the foreground—both in panel three and in front of it (as she crosses the gutter) makes it impossible for her left leg to be leaning against the panel line, which would be behind her if the space were three-dimensional. In two dimensions this is not a problem. She can lean against the panel line to support part of her body while another part of her body crosses through another part of the panel line and through the gutter and through the left panel wall of panel four (not to mention the implied wall that the refrigerator should be up against). 

The use of space becomes even funnier as a reader realizes that, even as the panel lines and gutters have become a physical part of Nancy’s world (they exist within her two-dimensional frame of reference or she wouldn’t be able to move across/through them), the gutter still serves its traditional purpose of denoting the passage of time between panels. Even as we see the cookie jar in a moment of frozen flight in panel four, we realize that the Nancy at the top of the ladder in panel four, drawn in profie, slightly crouched, with arms out, in anticipation of catching the jar, has turned 180 degrees between panel three and four. And she has turned fast, within the time it takes Nancy in panel three to throw the jar nearly half way across panel three, otherwise the jar would hit panel four Nancy in the back of the head. Jaimes does not illustrate Nancy’s movement. Unlike the motion lines that show the movement of the cookie jar, Nancy of panel four is simply facing in the opposite direction as Nancy of panel three. For the comic to make sense, we just have to know that she has quickly pivoted atop the ladder in the elapsed time of the gutter (which remains an actual physical space at the same time). 

Panel five shows us Nancy sitting atop the ladder, her hand inside the cookie jar, content in the knowledge that Aunt Fritzi has not looked up from the newspaper through the first five panels, and has thus not seen Nancy’s trick. Panel six shows us Nancy with a cookie with a bite taken out of it in hand. She thinks she has gotten away with her cookie thievery. She does not seem to notice that Aunt Fritzi has arisen from the couch and is walking toward the kitchen, with the newspaper under her arm. 

While I first thought that the comic’s gag was in the breaking of the wall between the third and fourth panel, the joke reaches another level in panel seven. Nancy is caught, as Aunt Fritzi, now in the kitchen, stares up angrily at Nancy. Nancy says, “But I broke the fourth wall! How could you see me?” At this point, it seems like Nancy’s awareness that she’s in a comic strip—“I broke the fourth wall)—is what Bushmiller called the snapper, the moment the joke hits home. But then we have the final panel, panel eight.

Panel eight closes in on Fritzi’s face. She hold up the newspaper in her left hand and point to it with her right. She has been readingNancy, which allowed her to see what Nancy was up to in panels one through eight. The final panel, partially obscured by Nancy’s hair (and note how we cannot see Nancy’s face in this panel, just as we cannot in panel one), shows us the face of a tiny Aunt Fritzi pointing at a newspaper. We cannot see the newspaper inside the comic, which also would show us Nancy’s face looking at the comic page into infinity. Aunt Fritzi does not have to say a word. She is like Destiny from The Sandmancomics; she can read what has happened, what is happening and what will happen, but she does not have to say anything. 

And there’s still more. Nancy, as it appears on the GoComics website, contains eight panels. The Nancythat appears in the newspaper in panel eight is made up of nine panels. There’s an extra panel in the newspaper. Looking closely, panels one and two of the online comic correspond to the first three panels the newspaper comic. Panels three through eight of the the web comic correspond to panels four through nine of the newspaper comic. Panel three of the newspaper comic, which is partially obscured by Nancy’s head in panel eight of the web comic, does not appear in the web comic. It seems to exist in the space between panel two and panel three of the web comic. In terms of time, the newspaper panel seems to take place during the time in which Nancy actually climbs the ladder, which we are never shown, because we don’t need to see it. If you look closely at panel three of the newspaper comic (in panel eight of the web comic), you can see the refrigerator, the cookie jar and part of the doorway, but Nancy’s hair blocks our view of the ladder, so that we can see her climbing in neither the web comic nor the newspaper comic. And for a final snap, I bet more people read today’s Nancyonline, not in newspapers.