A Report From Nancy Fest

  

 

A Report From Nancy Fest

 

We (my son and I) arrived at Nancy Fest at around 7:30 on Friday, May 24 so we missed most of the welcome talk. We drove the 650 miles from Des Moines to Columbus through torrential storms in Illinois and I forgot that we were driving from the central time zone to the eastern time zone. We should have left earlier. Anyway, we arrived hungry and were happy to find vegan hot dogs at the reception. We checked out the exhibit and talked to some people. The first person I talked to happened to be the guy who goes by “Erniebushmillerjrjr” on Instagram. We chatted with Bill Griffith, not realizing that he had been talking with Chris Ware!. There were more Nancy and Sluggo t-shirts here than I’ve ever seen anywhere else. 

 

On Saturday morning, we showed up at 9 for donuts and coffee. The first panel of the day “The Nancy Summit, oyr, The First Official Meeting of the Ernie Bushmiller Society” convened at 10. Brian Walker, Dennis Kitchen, Gary Hallgren, Kaz, and Bill Griffith (Patrick McDonnell had to cancel) discussed how and why they first came to appreciate Nancy and Bushmiller. I was not taking notes so I don’t remember exactly what everyone said (I know, great report) but one moment stood out for me. During the Q&A session, a member of the audience asked the panel what they thought of Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy. I was expecting to hear some disdain at this point, but that didn’t happen. A few panelists said they didn’t really follow Jaimes’s strip that much, but they were glad that the strip was popular. Brian Walker, who curated the exhibit, then said that he read a book called The New Nancy by some professor whose name he couldn’t remember. That professor was me. Walker said the book led him to appreciate what Olivia Jaimes was doing in the space between newspaper comics and webcomics. I was thrilled that he had read my book. 

 

At 11:30, the next presentation, and the one I was most excited for, started. The panel was called simply “The New Nancy.” Olivia Jaimes had planned to attend Nancy Fest in person, but could not. She recorded a slide presentation and asked that it not be recorded by the audience and that it be deleted right after her talk. Even as the voice reading the presentation spoke in the first person as Jaimes, I believe it was actually Jaimes’s editor, Sheena Wolf, who was reading.  Regardless, Jaimes presentation “How to Write Nancy” showed that she has studied Nancy in depth. 

 

Jaimes’ presentation used the humor that she brings to Nancy. She began by noting that what was to follow was “simply my take” and then saying “I am totally right about everything.” Jaimes argued that “a very specific type of gag defines Nancy.” Using a Bushmiller strip where Nancy looks at a crooked picture hanging on the wall and, instead of straightening the picture, she makes the chair she is sitting in crooked, Jaimes said that one could remove Nancy, Bushmiller’s draftmanship, and even change the words of the strip and it would still be recognizable as a Nancy gag. For Jaimes, a Nancy gag is a kind of analogy that makes “a nice shape” so that “Crooked frame is to straight viewer as straight frame is to crooked viewer.”  Jaimes went on to give multiple examples of these shapes in Nancy comics. She began to wrap up by saying “I love her.  I love Nancy so much.” Jaimes concluded by saying that she is “talking a brief and mysterious break” and that guest strips of Nancy would start appearing at the end of June. 

 

 

After a lunch break, Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik spoke on their foundational book How to Read Nancy. I’m sure most people reading this are familiar with their book so I won’t recap their discussion. I will note that their talk made clear just how much work they put into gathering the materials for their book, finding original copies of strips, and painstakingly working on the book’s appearance. They also noted that they thought they were finished writing about Nancy but wrote a short essay for the exhibit catalog about Nancy’s face. 

 

The next speaker was Bill Griffith, talking about and reading from his graphic biography of Bushmiller, Three Rocks.  His talk was fascinating. Griffith said that he hears his creation Zippy the Pinhead’s voice as somewhere between Raymond Burr and Julia Child. I had never thought about what Zippy sounded like, so this information has changed the way I read Zippy. Among other insights, Griffith argued that Fritzi’s and Nancy’s relationship was antagonistic and that Bushmiller had wished he could drop Fritzi from the strip, as he had inherited her character from Larry Whitington. Griffith talked about rejecting the idea of there being a firm line  between art and comics, which I’m sure his audience wholeheartedly agreed with. He talked about some similarities between Edward Hopper’s work and Nancy. He talked about the strangeness of 8-year old Sluggo’s libido. (It’s worth noting that Jaimes’s reboot of Nancy did away with any idea of a romantic relationship between Nancy and Sluggo, as well as leaving behind Sluggo’s attraction to every pretty girl he sees.) Griffith briefly talked about Olivia Jaimes. He said that Jaimes has not captured  the surrealism of Bushmiller’s work. He also said that Jaimes seems not to be concerned with craft. I think he’s completely right about both of these things. I think that Jaimes has used concerns about craft as content of her strip. Her “bad” art often serves as the gag in Nancy. See, for instance, her December 22, 2018 and March 5, 2019 strips.

But getting back to Griffith’s presentation, he read the epilogue to Three Rocks, in which his comic alter ego “Griffy” meets up with an aged Nancy at the “United Features Retirement Facility No. 34” which is situated behind the “Bushmiller Museum of Comic Art” in Stamford, Connecticut.  The epilogue is my favorite part of Three Rocks.  Readers see that Nancy characters Plato, Spike, and Dagmar all live in the retirement village. Sluggo, however, does not. Nancy thinks to herself “I dream about him all the time.” Sluggo meets up with Griffy and decides to go talk to Nancy. Sluggo has a long white beard and moustache. They play bingo and reconcile. I don’t think many people would say that Nancy is emotionally poignant, but Griffith’s epilogue certainly is. It was a joy to hear him read it and comment on it. 

 

At the book signing, I got Bill Griffith, Paul Karasik, Mark Newgarden, Denis Kitchen, Pete Maresca and Brian Walker all to sign my copy of the Sunday Press catalogue for The Nancy Show: Bushmiller and Beyond. Brian Walker was sitting next to Bill Griffith. I thanked Brian for reading my book, and I’m somewhat embarrassed to say,  I gave a copy of The New Nancy to Griffith. He at least pretended to be interested in it. While waiting in line at the signing, I talked to Gary Hallgren, who was selling original art. I had not known that he was now the artist for the comic strip Hagar the Horrible. I then realized that this fact answered a question that I had been wondering about for over a year. On May 5, 2023, Helga is sitting at a table with a woman who looks like what an adult version of Nancy drawn in the Hagar comic style would look like. Hallgren put her in the comic pretty much because he could. 

 

We unfortunately missed Tom Gammil’s play A Morning with Ernie Bushmiller as my son wanted sushi for dinner. I stopped briefly by the afterparty but did not stay long as I was tired. We drove home on Sunday. 

 

Nancy Fest was incredibly well done. Brian Walker’s curation of the exhibit is stellar.  Caitlin McGurk and the staff at Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum did a brilliant job. It was well worth driving over a thousand miles round trip in three days. Nancy Fest is over but the exhibit is at the museum until November. If you haven’t seen it, you should go. And you should buy a copy of The Nancy Show: Bushmiller and Beyond and, if you don't already own them, How to Read Nancy and Three Rocks. 

 

 

 

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. 

Re-presenting Poochie

Re-presenting Poochie

 I’m back writing about Nancy, hopefully on a more regular basis.

Readers of Nancy will know that Olivia Jaimes does not use many Ernie Bushmiller legacy characters besides the obvious big three of Nancy, Sluggo, and Aunt Fritzi.  Peewee, a toddler who Nancy sometimes babysat, is now a small child who takes things way too literally. When he is told that a basketball game is going to be “a walk in the park,” (July 10, 2019) readers see him in the final panel strolling through a park “miles away.”

But we haven’t seen any of Bushmiller’s adults such as Phil Fumble, Mr. Sputter and his wife, or Professor Floogle. Likewise the neighborhood kids Spike, Knuckles Noonan, Rollo the Rich kid, Nosy Rosie, Irma, Janie, and many others remain in the past. Nancy’s pet monkey, pig, sheep, and cat have not come back, and until recently her dog Poochie has only appeared once, briefly and unnamed, on June 27, 2018.

But, finally, during the last week of September, Poochie became the focus of five daily strips in a row.  As if reminding herself, her readers, and the characters in the strip that Nancy has a pet dog, Jaimes starts the week with a visual joke about Poochie’s existence. Her teacher, unaware that Nancy has a dog, asks her about it. Nancy then mentions Poochie by name for the first time in Jaimes’ strip, and then describes her. Nancy then implies that Poochie has been present by asking her teacher, “You’ve never noticed Poochie!?!” The punctuation “!?!” shows that Nancy is confused at her teacher’s lack of observational skills. Jaimes then has Nancy make a meta- joke by saying that Poochie is just a bit too short to appear in the comic. 

 There’s more than meets the eye going on with this joke. Comics scholar Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, in her essay “Reading Spaces: The Politics of Page Layout” has noted that comics “may be representations of space and spaces of representation simultaneously.”  Poochie’s invisibility exemplifies this point.  The rectangular panels of Nancy can be considered as “representations of space” in two ways. First, each panel delineates an exact space—panel one in the above strip represents the space that holds Nancy and her desk, a small section of the floor, a part of the wall, and a small bit of window. The third and fourth panels draw a rectangle around a smaller space—two thirds of Nancy’s desktop, her upper body, and part of the wall behind her. Second, readers of the comic read the strip as a whole and understand that the four strips together represent a classroom. Even if we only see Nancy at her desk in three panels and her teacher’s upper body in one panel, along with the aforementioned floor, wall, and window, we “see” that these four fragments represent a larger classroom that contains more desks, students, floor, walls, and window. We tend to do this seemingly without thought; we know Nancy and her teacher are in a classroom even as most of the classroom remains invisible to us.

Likewise, this strip can be seen as a “space of representation” in two ways. First, readers, and this writer, have to bring a lot of assumptions to the act of reading to see a classroom in this strip. Most readers will have their own experience of an elementary school classroom, of desks, and teachers, and floors, walls, and windows. As Kelp-Stebbins writes, readers and creators “activate and mobilize these technical possibilities into emergent forms of expression and meaning.” That is, our familiarity with these objects and this spatial arrangement is something we take for granted—we think the elements of the strip mean “classroom,” and we might take this representation of a classroom as a universal one. After a bit of thought, such taken-for-grantedness reveals itself as false. Not every child has access to a learning space like Nancy’s. Being able to understand what a space means is always political; that’s how I take what Kelp-Stebbins writes. Yikes! I’m now pretty far away from thinking about what’s funny about Jaimes’ joke. The second way I want to take “space of representation” gets closer to the joke. The panel can be seen as a space of representation in a very literal way in that it marks out what is actually drawn and thus represented to readers. In this way, the panel is like frame. We can see everything inside the frame precisely because Jaimes determines the perspective and scale of the frame. We see what she wants us to see. If she had wanted, she could have framed a panel so that readers could see multiple desks and students or even the entire classroom (minus the fourth wall, of course, that would make the room impossible to see). The perspective of panel four just happens to be “exactly” as low as Poochie is tall so we cannot see her, even if she is there. Nancy explains Poochie’s seeming absence from the all other strips (with that one earlier exception) when she universalizes her claim. Poochie is not just the exact right height not to fit in the panel in question, she is too short for “the bottom edge of every panel.” Poochie may have been in every single Nancy up to now and we would never have known because we could not see her. She does not seem to be in this particular strip though, as the first panel shows us the space below the bottom edge of panel four. Unless Poochie is below the floor we can see in panel one, she is not in this strip.  As a subtle final touch to this joke, Jaimes draws Nancy’s hand in the fourth panel so that a part of her thumb covers over the line that marks the bottom edge of the panel, and marks the tiny space between the bottom line and the top of Poochie. 

This joke seems to set Poochie free. The next day, she makes her way into all four panels. 

Notably, this strip is wordless and uses old-style visual cues to tell readers what is happening. Panel one sets up that Nancy wants Poochie to jump through a hoop, with a biscuit as a reward. The next three panels show us that Poochie has other thoughts, as represented by an “X” that marks a starting point for where Poochie is and dotted lines signifying the route that Poochie walks (or runs) to reach the treat without jumping through a hoop. Poochie cannot talk and we are given no words, but we know how she thinks. While this strip is not drawn from Poochie’s point of view, it does give us Poochie’s perspective on tricks and biscuits. As the next day’s strip illustrates, Poochie has become a means to think and joke about perspective and representation.

 

On September 25, we first see Poochie in the second panel, framed within the portrait view of Nancy’s camera. We have a representation of a representation, as Poochie appears within two frames, when she previously was outside of all frames. Nancy becomes distracted by the third frame in panel two, a television showing Pikachu. If Poochie won’t entertain Nancy and help her to become famous, Nancy will just watch t.v., filtered through her phone screen. 

The next day, Nancy, is outside eating a dripping ice cream cone while saying that she doesn’t get into trouble because she only spills food on the “black polka dots” of her pants (even though the ice cream cone looks brown?). Her upper body fills about two thirds of the panel and the speech bubble above her head fills the rest of the panel. Agnes, in panel two, framed pretty much the same way, asks her what happens if she’s standing up and eating. 

The joke of panel three at first seems to be that, when standing, Nancy only spills food on Poochie’s black spot. But the funnier joke takes us back to panel four of September 23. As Poochie is revealed in the third panel, we can retroactively see her below the panels of frame one and two, exactly where she would be if we think about how each panel represents space. 

The next day, Poochie does not appear in the first two panels, and Nancy does not even refer to her by name, only as “my dog."There’s a joke about acorns, and training, and squirrels as Esther questions Nancy. Both Nancy and Esther are shown from the waist up in panel one; Nancy is shown from the shoulders up in panel two. I cannot concentrate on what they are saying because I am wondering what Poochie is doing below the bottom panel. Panel three uses depth to show a squirrel in the foreground contemplating running the obstacle course that Nancy has created for it. But that is just and excuse to place Nancy and Esther far back in the landscape. We see their whole bodies standing on the horizon between ground and sky. They look tiny to signify that they are far away. Their height is only about 1/9^th of the panel’s height; they are drawn just about the same size as the squirrel in the foreground. And who is sitting there next to Nancy, drawn reaching up to Nancy’s midsection: Poochie, who has been in that exact spot the whole time. The perspective joke is funnier than the squirrel joke. Poochie returns to the strip  a few times in October but I wonder if she ever leaves. 

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. 

This Week in Nancy: "Mass Hysteria"

In How to Read Nancy, Karasik and Newgarden, in their discussion of "ballon design," note "Any number of word balloons can be used within a panel . . . For Bushmiller one balloon per panel was the norm, two were the exception, and three or more were reserved for mass hysteria" (140). On April 28, then Olivia Jaimes gives us mass hysteria. Five word balloons crowd the space of the third panel, crushing Nancy, who pulls her arms toward her body and grimaces. All of the words in the balloon exceed the space of the panel; almost half of the words cannot be read because the push into the invisible space inside or underneath the panel.

The words themselves continue Jaimes' meta-commentary from last week about Ernie Bushmiller purists. The first panel features Nancy, seemingly floating in white space, while someone off-panel intones, "Nancy is iconic for her simplicity." In panel two, another voice adds a longer commentary--notice that the line of the word balloon is lower in the second panel than the one in the first, suggesting a second speaker. Another speaker than chimes in from the right. We cannot see all the words that this speaker intones. The words will not fit in the panel. And the word balloons are beginning to crowd Nancy. She raises her hand as if defense, as if she is getting ready to push back. Her half-smile from the first panel becomes a frown. Her eyebrows straighten out and push toward each other. By the third panel, her mouth opens slightly in a frown. She looks like she cannot breathe. Word bubbles from the left and from the right touch each of her hands as she tries to push back. The word bubble in the bottom right side of the panel cover part of her shoe. Nancy is in danger of being blocked out, erased. That's the gag. The online commentary is not allowing us to see Nancy today.

On Monday, April 30, Jaimes continues her meta-commentary. Speaking to Sluggo, Nancy says "I'm sick of these reboots and restarts." Fans of Bushmiller everywhere nod in agreement (perhaps while they acknowledge but dismiss the irony as simplistic). Panel two zooms in on Nancy's angry face, ash she complains "why can't something that's gone stay gone?" The half of Sluggo's face that we can see looks neutral--his mouth a straight line, his nose a quarter circle and a dot, his pupil a black dot, and his eyebrow a semi-circle above his eye. Panel three pulls back from Nancy's face. We see four bushes and two gigantic flowers. Tiny black dots of pollen emanate from two of the bushes and the flowers. There are no rocks. The gag, as revealed by Sluggo's dialogue: Nancy was talking about the return of spring, and the pollen that causes her allergies. See--she wasn't talking about her own reboot. We have one more day of direct meta-commentary ahead of us. 

On May 1, Nancy sits on an undersized chair and looks through her window at the black diagonal slashes of rain falling. She says "I love the sound of rain." Readers, of course, cannot hear the rain, we can only see the black lines that signify rain is falling. In panel two, which zooms out a bit, Jaimes helps us to hear the rain. The word "PLOP" appears seven times, in bold type, around the window. But Nancy sees the words! The gag is in panel two. Her word balloon partially covers two of the "PLOPS" as she says "also the sight of the sound of rain." Karasik and Newgarden write, "In short: the lettering in comics is generally meant to be read and not seen." Undermining that general knowledge establishes the gag--we first read the words and hear them as the sound of rain but then Nancy sees them and we cannot help but see them. She concludes, in the third panel, her face occupying the middle third of the panel "Ahhhh . . . so relaxing." Her eyes are shut. Nancy does not see the "PLOP"s that fill the space around her because her eyes are shut. Note, too, that Jaimes uses what K and N call "The Modified Silhouette," the small white (or in this case, green) space that surrounds something. "A white halo around an object grants prominence" (143). Unlike the word balloons from a few days ago, the "PLOPS"s do not touch Nancy. Instead, they follow the contours of her body, head, hair, and bow. Not only do they lend prominence to Nancy, they keep their distance, as they are in on the joke. 

May 2 gives a straight-up visual gag. Nancy's jam handprint serves as not the kind of reminder that she intended. Sluggo is mad about the jam on his shirt but he is also aware of Nancy's obliviousness,  as one of his eyebrows arches and the other curls. No meta-, no social media, just a gag.

 May 3 returns us to the outdoors and to spring. Nancy seems to have gotten over her annoyance of a few days ago regarding spring. In the first panel, she is framed by blue sky as she smiles and says "Spring is so beautiful." The second panel makes a jarring shift in perspective. Nancy speaks from off-panel left, as we see bushes, flowers, and a tree take central focus, like the scene Nancy and Sluggo walked through on April 30. The bushes seem to have finished blooming. Instead of flowers, all they have are small black dots. Nancy sets us up for a visual gag. Spring is only beautiful "for the ten seconds I can see it before my eyes start tearing up from allergies." The ten seconds elapse in the gutter before panel three. The lines of the scene become wavy and imprecise. Nancy's teary vision infects the reader's eyes. But there's also a secondary joke. The word bubble in panel three differs from the one in panel two a bit. Whereas panel two's bubble's tail starts very close to the edge of the panel, telling us that the speaker is outside the panel, the bubble tail in panel three is a bit further from the edge. It actually seems to be emanating from the bush, which is now simply green, absent not only of flowers, but of black dots that signified flowers that have shed their petals. The bush speaks, "We had a good run this year." Is this another meta-commentary? Is the bush actually Bushmiller?

All of which brings us to today's strip. Nancy sits crosslegged on the floor, her laptop on her lap. "Reading social media all day is making me grumpy," she says, and her facial expression shows it. From outside the room, someone (Aunt Fritzi?) says, why don't you go outside? Nancy curtly answers "Fine." She still looks perturbed. Panel three's gag relies on the literalist Nancy established by Bushmiller, the Nancy who lounges with Sluggo in the "Lounge" and literally rests on someone's laurels. 

 In panel three, Nancy sits in the exact same position, legs crossed and laptop on her lap, only now, as the view pulls back a bit, we see that she is indeed outside. "Now there's glare on my screen!!!!" She has followed the advice given to her to its letter but not its intent. She is probably still reading social media as the sun shines down on her. But does the fact that Nancy sits among two trees and flower mean anything? Unlike the other two outdoor scenes this week, there are no bush(miller)es to be seen. Is Nancy free of the yoke of Bushmiller's long history? No--she is still reading the comments.

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?