This Year in Nancy

 The Year in Nancy

 

 

Olivia Jaimes published this comic strip on December 31, 2022, as a sort-of analog parody of apps like Spotify that give users year-end “Spotify Wrapped” lists of their most played songs. Such lists remind us that everything we do online leaves a record behind. Jaimes offers an analog solution, as she notes that newspaper comics cannot “automatically generate” a list of readers’ interactions with Nancy. Of course, as a few commentors on the GoComics website have pointed out, such a list could be generated for those who read Nancy online. A few commentors provided links to their ten favorite strips and answered the other questions that the strip posed. In that same spirit, but with perhaps a bit more detail, here is my list. 

 

This year I read 365 Nancies (assuming that doesn’t include reading pre-2022 strips or rereading 2023 strips). 

 

My favorite character was Poochie. I admire her ability to continually hide her being from Nancy’s attempts to document Poochie’s essence.

 

Here, in reverse order, are my top ten favorite Nancy strips from 2022. 

 

10.  January 30, 2022

 

This Sunday strip is a call back to my favorite Jaimes Nancy strip of January 20, 2019 where Nancy exclaims “But I broke the fourth wall” as she attempted to steal a cookie from the jar on top of the refrigerator. This strip uses a similar visual perspective with Aunt Fritzi in a room adjoining the kitchen. The refrigerator, with the cookie jar atop it, can be seen through a doorway into the kitchen. In the first three panel of this strip Sluggo tells Fritzi he doesn’t know where Nancy is while he contorts his right arm and hand into weird postures in each of the first three panels. Panels four, five, and six replay the first three panels with two differences in perspective. The images show closer views of Sluggo’s hand and arm while also rendering them as translucent. We learn that Nancy was “behind Sluggo’s hand” in each panel. His arm movements matched her movements as she climbed the chair, reached the cookie jar, and took it down from the top of the fridge. Sluggo and Nancy coordinated their movements so that Fritzi wouldn’t see Nancy getting the cookie jar. So many of Nancy’s jokes are about the difference between character perspective and reader perspective. 

 

 

9. November 16, 2022

 

This strip exemplifies Nancy’s use of overlapping speech and thought balloons filling panels and overlapping each other. Nancy’s teacher tries to convince Nancy that you can only learn so much in one day. The examples she gives Nancy all fail. Nancy never gets full; she can watch TV all day. But she can use her thought balloon to block out a lecture. 

 

8. September 01, 2022

In Jaimes’ strip, Aunt Fritzi and Nancy share many traits. Both often get caught in recurring thought spirals and both are addicted to technology. While Nancy refuses to admit her addiction, Fritzi constantly tries for self-improvement. Putting rubber bands around a phone is pretty nonsensical, as is simply tossing one’s phone away. Putting them together creates a great physics joke. 

 

7. February 03, 2022

I find myself drawn to meta-Nancys that project their self-awareness as a classic strip “rebooted for the twenty-first century. The text box in panel one provides that reflection in the shape of another contemporary media formation, the movie preview voice over. This strip is part of a series of strips in early 2022 where Nancy and Lyle, sometimes joined by other friends, sit in a movie theater. The final panel reminds us that nothing has actually happened in this day’s strip. The February 3, 2022 Nancy is just a preview for the 2/4/22 Nancy. The serial nature of daily comics has been explained. 

 

 

6. January 24 2022

 

 

Poochie appears infrequently in 2022. This strip exemplifies Nancy’s inability to take a good picture of her dog. Panel one shows us a blurry screen shot of Poochie. Panel two shows us Nancy attempting to take a picture of Poochie. Readers can see a clear image of Poochie even as we know Nancy’s camera cannot capture the image we see. Panel three moves the action to outside. Poochie sits regally in the same exact three-quarter profile while Nancy bounces on a trampoline with camera in hand. She wants to exactly match her bouncing with Poochie’s movement to get a clear picture. The  sound effect in panel three is redundant. Readers can see that Nancy is moving up and down because her body looks blurry. Comics are static but they have lots of ways to imply motion within panels. “Sproing.”

 

 

 

5. January 3, 2020

 

Nancy has always loved food. While her food-based gags are often visual (Nancy sees an object that reminds her of food), here the joke is language-based. Face down on her pillow, Nancy imagines a giant spatula, then a pancake, and so on. Panel four’s simple “feed me” tells readers all the need to know about Nancy’s relationship with food. Nancy must be fed.

February 3, 2022. 

 

4. November 11, 2022

 

 

Nancy still loves food. This strip seems particularly funny because the first two panels do not reveal to whom Sluggo is speaking. Besides the campfire and tree, he is standing among two rocks (the third rock is probably behind the big rock). His plan to use a fishing rod and hook to toast his marshmallow while keeping smoke out of his eyes is the kind of elaborate solution that characters in the strip often come up with. Nancy biting the marshmallow and looking like a caught fish on the right side of the final panel delays the joke as long as possible. I hope she didn’t get impaled on the fishhook.

 

 

3. June 7, 2022

This strip is a pure visual perspective joke. Sluggo holds a measuring cup at arm’s length between himself and a mirror to see what a new hat might look like. Nancy takes this occasion to smugly claim that bows are superior to hats. She notes that she will not be seen without her bow, which is of course part of her iconic look. Sluggo gets his revenge in the final panel by holding up a black spaghetti strainer, that exactly matches Nancy’s hair, directly in front of her bow. The perspective of the panel works to block reader’s view of the bow and Nancy does not look happy. 

 

 

2. November 21, 2022

The creator’s signature in a panel of the comic is a longstanding gag in comics. Ernie Bushmiller used it numerous times. Jaimes’ twist on the gag introduces a temporal element to the old joke. Nancy contemplates how to get a signature on a field trip form. In panel two she says she has to “wait” as she hold the permission slip right along the bottom edge of the panel. With an exclamation, Nancy sees the strip signed by Olivia Jaimes in the third panel. As she moves the permission slip in panel four, the signature stays on the form. “Signature” jokes often lead characters to reflect on the fact that they are a created thing. For Nancy, the joke is more about manipulating space and time. Knowing that “Olivia Jaimes” is a pseudonym and that Jaimes changed her signature over the first few months of the strip before sticking with the signature that readers see here shows that some scribbled cursive cannot guarantee one’s identity but it can get you permission to go on a field trip. Jacques Derrida could not have said/written it better in “Signature Event Context.” 

 

 

1. September 5, 2022.

 

Some of Ernie Bushmillers’ funniest Nancy’s were Labor Day strips; for me, this is likewise true with Jaimes. Jaimes’ Labor Day strip traces Nancy’s origin in the Fritzi Ritz strip in the 1930s  back to prehistoric times, with “Eukaryote Ritz” appearing in the fossil record 2.7 billion years ago. The Ritzocene provides the earliest known date for “the simple genius of the original.” Future comics historians may one day find an earlier geologic, or even extraterrestrial, marker, that remakes the whole field of comics studies. The “simple genius” of strips like this may date to the origin of the universe.