Nancy

It's been a long time since a shake-up of a traditional newspaper serial strip attracted as much attention as this clever reboot, drawn by pseudonymous cartoonist Jaimes (whose identity is hotly speculated). Jaimes's version of the venerable 80-year-old strip reads, on the surface, like a parody of an old property trying to reinvent itself as hip and edgy. In this collection of Jaimes's first year in on the joke, Nancy gets addicted to social media, joins her school's robotics club, and voices the preoccupations of a high-tech millennial. The strip mocks its own new direction, jokingly showing Nancy riding a Segway and declaring "Sluggo is lit"--a panel that immediately became an internet meme. Beneath the infinitely recursive irony, Jaimes's sensibility is remarkably similar to that of Nancy's creator, Ernie Bushmiller, whose extreme simplicity and penchant for fourth wall--breaking visual gags are now praised by critics as cartooning at its purest. If Bushmiller's work was so hypersincere it came off as sardonic pop art, Jaimes's is so hypersardonic it comes back around to sincerity. There's solid character humor, too, as Jaimes develops Nancy's personality and introduces new friends such as the perpetually crabby Esther. The basic art evokes Bushmiller's familiar figures while at the same time establishing its own contemporary stripped-down style. This gift-market-ready collection will be sought after by fans of the daily comic and is poised to broaden its readership. (Oct.)

While the original Nancy strips created by Ernie Bushmiller starting in 1938 remain revered for their minimalism and inventively composed gags, Nancy was a staple of the daily funny pages more appreciated than beloved before pseudonymous cartoonist Jaimes, the first woman to write and draw the strip, took over in 2018 and quickly turned it into a phenomenon. In this debut collection, Nancy is driven by wild contradictions--her absolute loyalty to her gruff paramour, Sluggo, is undercut by her extreme neediness; she's both wrathful and overly sensitive, devoted to self-improvement and ruled by gluttony and sloth, prone to spending an entire day thinking about how to avoid thinking hard. She's eager for authentic personal connection yet uncomfortable doing so without a phone in her hand, equally enthralled and repulsed by social media, extremely confident in how others should behave but completely blind to her own faults. She'd be a monster if she wasn't so painfully relatable and, owing to the verve with which she blazes her path through the world, absolutely charming. VERDICT Jaimes manages to maintain Bushmiller's minimalism and penchant for formal experimentation while creating something fresh, relevant, and most important, very funny.