Cover Image: Nancy

Nancy

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Member Reviews

I did not really get into this one, I usually love graphic novels but this was not for me. This is a compilation of life snippets, which makes it hard to read in one seating. I will be honest, I did not finish it.

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This collection includes strips from Jaimes’ first year of running Nancy. It has several laugh out loud moments throughout, and I find myself wanting to read more of the daily strip. There isn’t an overarching storyline to the collection. Instead, the strips are mostly just episodic hi-jinks or one-off jokes. Nancy does slowly but surely learn more about building robots in her robotics club, but that’s more about the comedic potential of Nancy building and controlling something mechanical.

If you’re looking for a good laugh from a strip that feels “relatable” without pandering, then you should definitely check out Olivia Jaimes’ Nancy.

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I was never a big reader of comic books, but like most children I wanted to read the comics in the newspaper and I always read Nancy first. I think I enjoyed how real she seemed... like a girl I could know. She was just a normal kid like me. She was a bit sassy at times; she was awkward; she was imperfect. And I loved all of that about her.

I looked it up. The original strip debute in 1922. So when I read them in the 1960s and 1970s she was already middle aged. But a year ago Olivia Jaimes brought Nancy back to the page and created the same vivid girl with the same iconic look, but very modern struggles. This Nancy stays up into the wee hours playing on her phone. This Nancy is on Instagram and is worried about the number of Followers. This Nancy uses today's slang and reminds her aunt that "fresh" no longer means "rude." This Nancy even wears pants!

I am aware that some fans were disappointed, but I loved them. The comic is still about the normal life of a normal girl. It is just about a normal girl living in this decade. It is funny, a bit silly, and sometimes heartwarming. And for me, it was very nostalgic and sweet.

Nancy is a great comic for girls because it isn't often that the comic's star is a girl and even rarer that the artist is a woman.

Thank You NetGalley, Olivia Jaimes and the publisher for the digital ARC in exchange for my honest review.

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An excellent collection of cartoons. Olivia James has brought the classic comic strip Nancy into the 21st century. Each strip will at least make you chuckle internally and at most laugh out loud and laugh again when you think about it days, weeks and months later. A near perfect take on a simple comic suitable for children and adults.

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This tickled me to the core. Olivia Jaimes' mastery of the character of Nancy is just wonderful! I read through this quickly but then went back and found my favorites to read again. This will definitely have me looking in the comic section of the paper for a long time!

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I’ve never read any of the classic Nancy comics, but her look is iconic. I feel like I could identify a Nancy comic from across the room by the shape of Nancy’s head alone. The fact that those comics were ubiquitous enough to become iconic but passé enough that I’d never read any of them is a fascinating contradiction.

Nancy is one of a handful of undead syndicated comics, kept running by a series of artists after the original artist died. It’s the sort of thing that newspapers carry by default for the sort of people who still get newspapers and read the comics section. That’s why the handoff to Olivia Jaimes was such a shock to the system; after decades of comfortable, predictable irrelevancy, Nancy was suddenly reentering the pop culture discussion and getting read and shared by young people.

One of the most interesting things about Jaimes is that she wanted to bring Nancy back to her original spirit while updating the trappings of the strip for modern times. Her predecessor had turned Nancy into a parade of cutesiness and made the strip toothless and unfunny. Jaimes’ vision of Nancy was as a stubborn little girl who is always scheming, in a strip packed full of absurd jokes that sometimes get a little meta.

The most famous Nancy image from Jaimes’ reign so far, “Sluggo is Lit“, is a meta joke about the cartoonist not wanting to do a strip and providing previews of upcoming stories, but it’s also a poke at the sort of people upset that Jaimes is updating Nancy with modern sensibilities. The only reason that anyone is talking about Nancy comics in 2019 is because Jaimes made them resonant for our times.

This collection includes strips from Jaimes’ first year of running Nancy. It has several laugh out loud moments throughout, and I find myself wanting to read more of the daily strip. There isn’t an overarching storyline to the collection. Instead, the strips are mostly just episodic hi-jinks or one-off jokes. Nancy does slowly but surely learn more about building robots in her robotics club, but that’s more about the comedic potential of Nancy building and controlling something mechanical.

If you’re looking for a good laugh from a strip that feels “relatable” without pandering, then you should definitely check out Olivia Jaimes’ Nancy.

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The aptly named Nancy by Olivia Jaimes is a comic collection that covers the first nine months of Jaimes’ run on Nancy. Nows as good a time as any to tell you that NetGalley provided me with a free digital copy for reviewing purposes. It’s just as well, it saved me from having to hunt down all of the strips individually online- and boy, it did not disappoint. Within the first few pages of the comic we get a mix of both the old and new Nancy. We see Nancy going completely insane on some cornbread, sharing earbuds with Sluggo, thinking about herself, and talking about life with Sluggo (while both gaze at their phones). Nancy may have been upgraded to a new generation, but her essence is still there- even the meta artist-shaming jokes are there, with a notice that “Any questionable art from now on is because Nancy and Sluggo are using a snapchat filter”.

The storylines are simplistic and easy- we see Nancy joining Robotics club, but aside from her own created dramatics, there’s no rise and fall to the story. The strips are bite-sized and able to be digested on their own and out of order, and if it weren’t for the occasional introduction of new characters of the mention of time-relevant holidays (this is the newspaper’s funnies strip, after all) I wouldn’t have even noticed the order that the comics go in. It was easy for me to get a few strips in, get a laugh, send a strip to my fiance to tell him “look it’s you” at one of Sluggo’s misfortunes, and then go back to work.

The art in Nancy isn’t always perfect. The artist herself knows it, and pokes fun at it. But what is always in check is the humor. I found myself laughing constantly at Nancy’s well relatable despairs and hopes for her an easy and fun life. Nancy is my millenial id, seeking only the pleasure of video games during a day of school or work. She reaches the most selfish and irresponsible parts of my soul- and that’s why I love her, and why this collection made me laugh so much. From wondering if her friends angry with her for ending a text with a period, to ragging on people who brag on social media on social media, Nancy gets me. And I think that if you read it, you’ll find she gets you too. You just may have to look past the smartphones and selfie sticks and hover boards to do so.

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I don’t regularly read a newspaper that currently runs Nancy, so this collection was completely new to me. It is so good to be reunited with a friend of my childhood. I will admit to finding it a bit bizarre to see her in the land of technology, but the drawing style and sense of humor are true to form. I still love her.

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Well, it was a shock to read the intro to this book, and to see someone claim Nancy has been around for "literally" a hundred years. I'd never seen or heard of her. But I did like what I saw – a troublesomely cute, chunky-thighed, miniskirted girl who's hot on laptop time, and cold on nature, proper schooling and real friendships. I guess, though I may be wrong, the new creative source was behind this being incredibly meta at the start, discussing the strip's own art, jokes, and novelty values. It even discusses itself as being meta – how meta is that?! It did soon settle a little into a slightly more regular tale of a regular girl, never ageing or progressing but muddling through life as a kind of smarter Wimpy Gal. And that, don't'cha know it, was fine. For this kind of thing, the hit rate was high, and this is commended. So yes, I downloaded the sequel during the reading of this Book One.

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Growing up, Nancy was a fixture in my household (my mother, also a Nancy, shared a lot of personality traits with the main character and other family members had a tendency to point out comics even if we had missed one that further resembled my mom.). I wanted to like this more contemporary version, but it feels way too forced to me. I don’t know if I would have enjoyed it more going into it with no past experience with “Nancy”. The comics aren’t bad, they just lack that familiar feel in my opinion.

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This the first I really read any Nancy so I can't make a comparison to it's older versions but I found it entertaining! The graphics style is cute and the humour is snappy, modern and clever.

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I liked this new approach to a classic comic character. It's fun to read and well done.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

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Thanks to Olivia Jaimes, what was once a stale relic of a long-bygone era has been completely reborn. Wonderfully weird and chocked full of meta-humor, "Nancy" is more than just relevant again - it is hands-down one of the best comic strips today.

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"This problem is SO EASY. What a SIMPLE assigment. The answer is OBVIOUS. If everyone wastes the next few minutes feeling discouraged, I think we can catch up."

I feel so hard for this comic! Nancy's sarcastic humor is the best! Olivia Jaimes did a wonderful job with this iconic character, and I couldn't get enough of the meta jokes.

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I’ve been a fan of the Nancy comics for a while, and it was nice to get some new material. The classic Nancy we know with a fun new touch.

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A modern take on a classic character - perfectly and lovingly done by Olivia Jaimes. Would recommend for anyone who is a fan of classic comic strips, and will be a great addition for anyone who is into webcomics. Recommended!

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This is such a cute book! It really has good cartoons with the best
of Nancy! I enjoyed it very much. I think it would make a special
gift for someone that has followed Nancy.

Thank you so much, Olivia Jaimes, the Publisher, and Netgalley for
allowing me to read this cute book!

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Back when I was a kid, off the back of the Beano and such, I had a phase of reading pretty much anything that looked like a comic. It was how I first encountered superheroes, and 2000AD, and (far too young to understand most of it) Watchmen. But I'd also read those little paperback collections of Peanuts, or Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side obviously, or even the Dandy if there was literally nothing else. And sometimes you'd get other American strips, less a part of British culture than Snoopy or Hobbes. Stuff like Mad (RIP), the Wizard of Id, Broom Hilda. Stuff which frequently made no sense whatsoever, because these yellowing collections were addressing concerns that were too old for me, a decade or more out of date, and an ocean away from my life. But I read them anyway because hey, kids - comics! Do you have any idea how baffling a 1982 Doonesbury collection was to a British child in 1988? I still finished it.

And even back then, I swear I never read a panel of Nancy.

I've come to recognise her since, through references in other stuff, and pastiches, and so on. That simple, sulky semi-profile. But the same as I know Archie through references and reboots and crossovers and weird TV takes, the original just never seemed like something with any relevance to me – one of those slices of Americana that only worked if you'd grown up with it. Sure, she'd been going for literally a century, making the veteran DC characters look like unsteady new launches, but presumably that just meant it was one of those strips kept going more through inertia than art.

And then suddenly comics sites started talking about the new writer-artist.

Olivia Jaimes wasn't a name I knew at all, but the sample strips in those articles were doing great stuff, mucking with the form of the strip cartoon, breaking the fourth wall, all that jazz. Doing it with charm, too. And addressing modern concerns (smartphones, social media, the usual), but doing so with the knowledgeable snark of the insider, not the boomer vitriol you'd expect from such a venerable and widely-syndicated strip. Those samples were not flukes; this collection has a very good ratio of laughs, and of strips you want to show someone else. I might quibble with the layout, which (and this is not a complaint I make very often) could have done with more empty space; there's not enough of an obvious distinction between pages which are meant to be read as pages (presumably the Sundays) and pages containing three discrete strips. But otherwise, I think this mix of laughs and insight and neat formal trickery is exactly what I was after when I was ploughing my uncomprehending, dogged way through the likes of Hägar the literally Horrible all those years ago. In an interview at the back, the mysterious Jaimes - she seems to be concealing her identity on some level, and who can blame her these days - talks about her aims for the strip. And I'm not so sure about the plans for some small measure of character growth, because I may only just have met Nancy as an unapologetic, devious creature of appetite, but dear heavens she speaks to me.

(Netgalley ARC)

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I thought this was just a fabulous book. It's simply a collection of the Nancy comics from the past year or so, but they are all great and it was a lot of fun reading through them again. The jokes are very funny, and Olivia Jaimes is a wonderful writer. You would buy this book if you want a collection of the strips in print form. Otherwise, you can always look them up online.

Nancy is one of my favourite comic strips, and I think the character is one that most people will identify with.

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Olivia Jaimes breathes life in her new Nancy comics, Hilarious and meta, these comics round out the Nancy strips in a fun, new way.

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