The long-running NANCY comic strip has a new artist - and this fact has gotten the strip, which runs in under 100 newspapers now, a quite a bit of " big time " publicity! Both the A. V. Club and the New York Times have written about TBD new artist, Old is Jaime's, who is advertised as a woman working under a pseudonym, for her drastic. change, both in drawing style and general approach, from the last argosy,, Guy Gilchrist. I am having posting problems now, so I'll just say that Ms. James' first two weeks-ish of sales - No Sundays yet. - an be found at GoComics. Com.
I really like the new "tone." Certainly very modern. Lots of references to the Internet. This one, from last week, has gone viral.
..." have written about the new artist, Olivia Jaimes " is what I meant to write above. This phone's " Correct " function!
The drawing style is more reminiscent of Ernie Bushmiller than whomever took over after he died. I liked it when I was a kid. I don't know why so many newspapers seem to have dumped it.
But what about "the last argosy"? I'm more surprised that it's still running at all - I didn't know Nancy was still around until this latest re-do started getting publicized. Are there any others that have been continuously published for over 80 years (and not just in reprints, a la Peanuts), aside from Blondie?
I still see Prince Valliant in the Sunday comics. Does anyone still read it? Gasoline Alley is also still hanging in there. I never liked that one but somebody must like it.
The new artist looks a lot more faithful to the Bushmiller style than her predecessor (Guy Gilchrist) was. I see no problem with having modern points of reference, as long as the characters behave in character (which they seem to be doing in the above example).
I had no idea this strip was still alive until I saw this panel and a few others on Twitter a couple weeks ago. Very funny and smart writing, relevant but somehow true to the original. The new artist has really nailed this. dan c
I went and looked at the new writer's run, and though some of the strips are pretty good, I get the feeling she thinks that simply "updating" Nancy and throwing out 21st century notions like "bots" and "likes" is enough. There's not a ton of real comedy in most of these - they feel more like random references to social media...
...I think The Katzenjammer Kids, and Popeye are still running, for absolute old-/oldsters, in new Sunday strips still, though I don't follow them anymore - I did a few years ago on the Internet, I think Popeye still publishes reprinted Bud Sagendorf dailies, as well. Basically, a whole lot of really old comic strips are still published since someone seems to like them still somewhere - perhaps overseas - Meaning " from the U.S. " - or small town/secondary newspapers. This was long-term true, but since the Internet, it is easier to keep up with/follow/see such strips - Including reprinted ones.
Have you read the older strips by Ernie Bushmiller? There was not a ton of real comedy in them either. Nancy was never laugh-out-loud funny... it was simplistic, corny, and a little bit weird. Taking a look at the new strips, they seem very similar in style and tone to what Bushmiller used to do, simply with updated points of reference.
They should've brought in alt-cartoonist Mark Newgarden, who co-wrote the recent book How To Read Nancy and has been known to take the character in some interesting directions...
One of my cartoonist friends credited much of the success and longevity of the (original Bushmiller) Nancy strip to its simplicity: “You see it there, and by the time you decide you don’t want to read it, you’ve already read it.” If you look at the earliest archived strips on GoComics.com, Guy Gilchrest was sticking much closer to the Bushmiller model than it would become. Guy eventually shaped it into his own more personal style, making country music a factor in the strip, of all things. I think Jerry Scott put in some time on the strip before Guy took it on, and that was an updated visual style.
Ha. That's very true. I never was a huge Nancy fan, aside from the Dell comics done by John Stanley (which were nothing like the comic strip). He employed a style that was very heavily Watterson-influenced. In fact, I came across an example the other day of a strip where he blatantly swiped several panels from Watterson. If he did it once, I suspect he did it on more than one occasion.
But I checked on the original page where that appears, and it is only a simulated example of plagiarism that might occur. comic plagiarism. What is stealing, borrowing, influence? | kidzcomic.com - Part 5 The Calvin and Hobbes panels were not one strip, it was assembled from several original C&H strips to duplicate the Nancy strip. "The first strip is a Nancy comic strip drawn by Jerry Scott, the second strip is a fictional Calvin and Hobbes comic strip composed of panels from separate Calvin and Hobbes comic strips." IMHO that was not a proper way to illustrate the point of the author of that page.
Aha, I did not read closely enough. You're absolutely right. The overall point is still sound, though. Scott constructed a Nancy strip that is comprised almost entirely of swipes from Watterson. Swiping is a form of plagiarism without doubt. You are correct though that they shouldn't have compiled the original Watterson panels like that, because it creates a false impression (to inattentive morons such as myself) that Scott blatantly copied an entire strip, rather than simply swiping from various strips... the former being somewhat worse ethically than the latter.
I’ll join what should be a chorus, the treatment of Jerry Scott in this article is unfair and goes to extraordinary means to create the writer’s point (Frankensteining a C&H strip to resemble the Nancy strip to make a case for plagiarism). For one thing, Jerry Scott hardly needs to look up reference in order to draw a character building a snowman. He’s an accomplished cartoonist with many years under his belt. I’ve had the opportunity to see the rough art he does in creating the Zits strip (the final art is done by his collaborator Jim Borgman) and it is surprisingly complete, but never seen by the public. The fact is, when two cartoonists draw similarly-proportioned characters doing similar actions, such as building a snowman, there are bound to be similarities in the drawings — there are only so many ways to depict a kid pushing a big snowball —and when the examples are cherry-picked and assembled in a way that the article-writer did, it’s going to create a particular impression.
