Nancy the perfect cat is named for Nancy Sinatra, of course, and her boots (not seen here). That's a no-brainer. Initially I named her Riley (that's what she's called on her desexing certificate, I hope that doesn't ever cause a problem). I had this idea of her living the life of riley, you see, so she would be out in the world having adventures and sometimes coming back to check in but never really being a domesticated cat. At the time she was so wild you couldn't even touch her. So it was a bit arrogant calling her Riley in a way because it was like 'you live your life and just feel grateful that you can', but on the other hand, the council would have had her put down as an unredeemable feral. But as all three cats in the room with me right now show, no-one is ever an unredeemable feral. A few minutes ago (Nancy will be disgusted to read) I had Pompey and Chanticleer both crawling over me purring. These were cats who a few months ago would not let a person touch them (I don't think anyone ever had) and would constantly hiss at anyone other than each other.
Anyway I actually came here to talk about Nancy the comic strip, which as you may know has experienced an extraordinary revival in the last year and a bit (?) under the direction of a woman whose name we don't know (but we do accept it's a woman, for some reason) pseudonymously called 'Olivia Jaimes'.
Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy (I made quite a few contributions to this wikipedia entry, not about Nancy but about Bushmiller, which I was fairly pleased with, that's what I'm like) was, as Jaimes has sussed, a greedy and self-centred, if benign, little child whose femaleness was reasonably irrelevant (in the sense that she wasn't girly). Did I get that right? I mean, she was greedy and self-centred, but that it was only in that low-key way that most children are. She was a creative problem solver, for herself and others, but only insofar as the solving meant some kind of quirky labour-saving or unexpected reuse, etc.* It was actually when it comes down to it all about the gag, although to his credit Bushmiller seems to have kept the simple character traits of Nancy in place for decades. The wikipedia entry satisfactorily conveys his approach I think.
What intrigued me was what happened after Bushmiller died, particularly in the Guy (and Brad) Gilchrist years prior to Jaimes coming on board, where the Nancy strips just got cheesier and cheesier and Aunt Mitzi just got bustier and bustier, and it all ends up being like some kind of alien misreading of Americana (or an all-too-true reading, I don't know anymore). Going to the Nancy site and hitting 'random' will quickly get you to some of these. I did it just then and got to this from 1998:
Anyway I'm not here to demonise Guy Gilchrist I'm just more interested in, a la Mickey Mouse or Elton John, how a property/product loses its defining or interesting features over time, and becomes a kind of cipher that people just want to have around, without really caring what else they might get out of it. The cultural version of comfort food I suppose.
So hats off to whoever decided to bring 'Olivia Jaimes' on board for the post-Gilchrist Nancy because it has gone from being a dull anachronism to the funniest daily comic strip in the mainstream now, by far. Not only is it in itself brilliant, the characters - all the new supporting characters Jaimes has brought in, teachers and friends and enemies etc - are (I don't think I'm reading too much into this, maybe I am) a billion times more rounded than most comic strip casts, and that even (no definitely) goes for Aunt Fritzi, who is actually now, like, a person.
I also love Jaimes' ability to cap a decent enough joke (in this case, that Sluggo's musical notes turn into Zs - that's Bushmilleresque) with an actually really funny last frame, that shows once again how self-centred Nancy is, but for some reason it's ok because she's just clueless about it. She's closer to one of Sarah Silverman's typifications of herself (obviously not SS herself) in that regard than she is to the original Bushmiller Nancy, let alone the kewpie troll of the Gilchrist era.** I'm lovin' it.
*Exception is I suppose that Sluggo is her boyfriend and she has a lot of fears and tribulations when it comes to maintaining that relationship. I can't really go there. I don't think they're sleeping together.
** I am probably being too hard on the Gilchrists, some of their stuff was OK, but it just comes across as OK despite themselves, not because they were trying to be great. Does that make sense? Maybe not. The poignancy of this frame explains what I mean:
No comments:
Post a Comment