This Week in Nancy: Labor Day and Beyond
September 5 to September 12, 2022
After a long time off from doing this, I’m back. Anyway.
Labor Day, September 5, 2022
Keeping with her variation of Ernie Busmiller’s tradition of “not working” on Labor Day, Olivia Jaimes published a funny, text-heavy strip that pokes fun at the veneration of Nancy’s Bushmillerian legacy. Jaimes hearkens back to the early days of her strip, circa April 2018, when she anticipated and declawed critiques of her work by noting that “questionable art” was just a snapchat filter, and having Nancy say that she ignores “negativity on the internet.” Nancy even went meta by saying “I’m sick of all these reboots and restarts.”
Four and a half-years later, Jaimes offers readers a look at her “upcoming book on the history of the Nancy comic strip.” She notes that “diehard fans” know that Nancy was originally a character in the Fritzi Ritz comic strip. Jaimes extends this logic as she points out that Fritzi had been a side character in a strip about her aunt, as readers see an image of a suffragist named “Bathsheba” Ritz with her niece Fritzi. This panel pushes Fritzi’s origin to the late 19th / early 20thcentury, setting the date of her origin decades earlier than previously known. (Fritzi Ritz debuted on October 9, 1922.)
Jaimes then absurdly extends this origin to prehistory, as we see an image of “Eukaryote Ritz” from 2.7 billion years ago. Somehow, the billions-years-old cellular organism look like Nancy and Fritzi; the “Nancy” organism’s shape mimics the spikes of Nancy’s hair and the “Fritzi” organism seems to be looking backwards at Nancy.
No matter how much of an expert on comics history you might be, Jaimes shows readers that there’s always someone who knows more. For Jaimes, “the simple genius of the original” does not refer to an early Bushmiller cartoon. Rather, Nancy’s austere roots are evident in the fossil record. We are not living in the Holocene or the Anthropocene. Our age is the Ritzopocene.
In other action this week, Nancy drives Fritzi crazy by gluing the wheels of an office chair to the carpet on September 7, rearranging crooked pictures into the shape of a house on September 8, and fitting the wind chimes outside her window with pool noodles on September 11, a move that gets a giant “!” when Fritzi sees them. Nancy’s solutions continue to trump logic, even as her teacher warns her about poor grades on September 9. Nancy justifies her claim that she’s “the best at everything” because she knew that any bad news she got would simply be “the universe trying to bring me down a peg.” If Nancy can “call” it before it happens, she’s still the best. I don’t disagree.
Detail from September 11, 2022 Nancy
