The Revamped "Nancy" Is the Perfect Comic Strip for 2018

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The comic’s first woman artist mines her own girlhood experience to make the eternally 8-year-old, cookie-loving grouch even funnier.

... the girl in the strip is Nancy, one of the funny pages’ most revered creations. She has been 8-years-old for 85 years running. She’s always been a little sassy, a little rude, 100-percent kid. In all of her iterations she hates school, loves cookies and is always causing minor commotions.

Revamped this spring by an artist using the pseudonym Olivia Jaimes, Nancy has taken on a new life, for the first time hanging out with non-white characters, musing about the social dynamics of texting and the proportion of time we spend online today where (ironically) many people will read this comic.

Nancy was born on January 2, 1933, as a bit character in the popular syndicated newspaper comic Fritzi Ritz drawn then by the now-revered cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller. He was the youngest cartoonist to helm a nationally syndicated strip.

“He experimented with a whole host of cousins and nephews, all male characters throughout the ’20s performing the same role Nancy did. None of them really stuck,” Mark Newgarden, who co-authored the book ‘How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels’ with Paul Karasik, says. “He tried making that character female in the ’30s, and the result was really instantaneous.” People loved her.

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