"Sluggo is lit"

November 26, 2018 2:39 PM

Olivia Jaimes, the Mysterious Cartoonist Behind ‘Nancy,’ Gives Rare Interview (NYMag) (previously)
posted by Doktor Zed (64 comments total)

Read this earlier, it's a fun and pretty on-point feeling interview. I continue to really enjoy the work she's doing on Nancy, and really really cackled at the Sluggo Is Lit strip.
posted by cortex at 2:53 PM on November 26, 2018 [4 favorites]

I can't imagine (mostly because comics are Not Really A Thing where I live) how it feels when such a fossilized part of your pop culture suddenly comes to life and sparkles. I can't even think of anything comparable, most of pop culture icons don't reach this age.
posted by hat_eater at 3:07 PM on November 26, 2018 [13 favorites]

Honestly, the new Nancy might be one of the best things out of 2018. It's SO GOOD and honestly even better than you think. I love it so much.
posted by sleeping bear at 3:19 PM on November 26, 2018 [10 favorites]

My brain read this as "Cathy", and I was super-duper confused for a bit...
posted by Windopaene at 3:21 PM on November 26, 2018 [5 favorites]

My brain read this as "Cathy", and I was super-duper confused for a bit...

Me too! I am glad I was wrong, because this interview is great.
posted by trillian at 3:27 PM on November 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

I got to the end of the interview and another thing I can't imagine is how a person who touched this fossil and turned it into this marvelous thing and then just kept going can sound so... normal.

But it didn’t really even feel real as I was signing the contract. I was like, “Hahaha, what a funny joke this is."

Maybe deep down, she thinks she's dreaming! But seriously, all this is so cool.
posted by hat_eater at 3:31 PM on November 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

#relatable
posted by Artw at 3:39 PM on November 26, 2018 [7 favorites]

Thought this article was deja vu all over again but realized I'd had it confused with this profile of Jaimes and Nancy from two weeks ago, also from NYMag/Vulture, which features these tidbits about predecessor artist and creepazoid Guy Gilchrist:

... From 1995 until this year, “Nancy” was helmed by Guy Gilchrist, who took it in an increasingly schmaltzy and sexualized direction, making Aunt Fritzi disturbingly buxom and Nancy into a kind angel and regularly inserting tributes to dead country singers.

This February, Gilchrist exited the strip in a fog of confusion. Three months earlier, in a public, now-deleted Facebook post, one of Gilchrist’s former assistants had accused him of sexual and physical assault. Gilchrist tells me in an email that the allegations are “patently false” and that he chose to leave owing to a diagnosis of degenerative-disc disease in his back. However, John Glynn, president of the syndicate that distributes “Nancy,” tells me, “We were ready to make a change on the property because the creator who had done it before Olivia had gone as far as he could.”

posted by hangashore at 3:49 PM on November 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

It took me awhile before I realized that nuNancy has an Ernie Pook's Comeek vibe and Olivia Jaimes sounds a little like Lynda Barry. Marlys is the Greatest!
posted by Nelson at 3:51 PM on November 26, 2018 [6 favorites]

No.

(By which of course I mean, bring it!)
posted by chavenet at 3:57 PM on November 26, 2018 [6 favorites]

Kate Beaton is Olivia Jaimes. Give me a few minutes and I'll have the whole red-string board set up to prove it.
posted by muddgirl at 4:11 PM on November 26, 2018 [34 favorites]

Vulture caught up with the elusive draftswoman about the secret origin of her much-memed “Sluggo is lit” panel, the contents of her iPhone notes about strip ideas, and the overlap between “Nancy” and The Good Place.



💡
😐
Henry
posted by clavdivs at 4:11 PM on November 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

The moment I realized I love the new Nancy was June 1, 2018
posted by Existential Dread at 4:19 PM on November 26, 2018 [13 favorites]

(also I am now catching up from the beginning of Jaimes's run and Nancy is an icon for a generation).
posted by muddgirl at 4:20 PM on November 26, 2018

The moment I realized I love the new Nancy was June 1, 2018

this was it for me. I think of it as "How To Read 'How To Read Nancy'".
posted by thelonius at 4:26 PM on November 26, 2018 [14 favorites]

My favorite choice for Person Who Is Not Olivia Jaimes But I Really Wish She Was is Allie Brosh.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:28 PM on November 26, 2018 [21 favorites]

I hope she's nobody we've ever heard of. more cartoonists like this plz
posted by prize bull octorok at 4:37 PM on November 26, 2018 [8 favorites]

I'm still occasionally just shocked that Nancy Is Good Now.
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:39 PM on November 26, 2018 [5 favorites]

i showed my zen teacher the new nancy and she laughed really hard and i felt so vindicated
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 4:43 PM on November 26, 2018 [12 favorites]

Nancy is the monster from the id who is aware that she's the monster from the id and is down with it, like, "I can't help it, I'm drawn this way."
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:45 PM on November 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

This is the comic that really sold me on new Nancy.

(Featured comment: "I think the new artist/writer is terrible." 🙄)
posted by Phssthpok at 4:48 PM on November 26, 2018 [15 favorites]

The bit about #relatable is such a great insight into the current spate of slice-of-life webcomics. I think stuff like Blue Chair / Owlturd, Loading Artist, and to some extent Poorly Drawn Lines are all doing a vicarious dance with being relatable that she talks about, and it can be hit or miss wholly depending on my mood. But man when it hits they all speak to my very soul. This is why the current Nancy is so great.
posted by numaner at 5:07 PM on November 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

I've got a theory about who Olivia Jaimes is, but I don't want to say it, because I wouldn't want to put it out there in the unlikely event that I were right. If I am right, it's someone who is not hugely well-known but whose identity might kind of overshadow the work in various ways, and I can see why she would want to establish herself as the cartoon's creator before people knew her name.

Anyway, I want someone to write something about Neopets, because it's amazing how tech or tech-adjacent women her age cite that as an early site of creativity.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:10 PM on November 26, 2018 [6 favorites]

I really like the trend of appreciation of but not reverence for zombie properties like Nancy, Mark Trail, and Archie.
posted by mattamatic at 5:14 PM on November 26, 2018 [4 favorites]

It feels so weird to actually go out of my way to read a comic strip, like they put in the newspapers

New Nancy is so good, though — it is effectively a webcomic that happens to also get printed every day
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:34 PM on November 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

Honestly I hope it's like Dril where even if someone reveals their true identity everyone sort of shrugs because it's both not someone a lot of people have heard of and not relevant to the art being generated.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:52 PM on November 26, 2018 [9 favorites]

Thank you for pointing out how great Nancy is I was completely unaware.
posted by graventy at 6:02 PM on November 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

Olivia Jaimes's Nancy is really good and very much in the spirit of Bushmiller. She gets what works in the classic strips. But reading through the comments on these, with all the gate keeping comments on the GoComics site about Jaimes' work, I was curious about the Guy Gilchrist strips. I know only the Bushmiller strips so I was really surprised to read a sampling of the Gilchrist strips - they are barely recognisable as Nancy. And, to put it politely, not something I care to read or feel is worth my time.
posted by Ashwagandha at 6:04 PM on November 26, 2018 [6 favorites]

There was a period where Olivia Jaimes was doing the weekday strips and the weekend strips were rerun Guy Gilchrist (probably to help ease the former into producing 7 strips a week, as alluded to in the interview) and dear reader, it was not pleasant to go back and forth between the old and the new.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:08 PM on November 26, 2018 [5 favorites]

My exact snarky comment when Sluggo is Lit came out:

Don't worry, Gilchrist fans, Olivia Jaimes has heard your complaints about too much modern technology and Aunt Fritzi not being hot enough

posted by ckape at 6:12 PM on November 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

The only thing more disorienting than Nancy being good now is that the official merch is sold through Topatoco.
posted by ckape at 6:30 PM on November 26, 2018 [10 favorites]

My first intro to Nancy was people sharing a Bushmiller strip where Nancy asks for a loan to go to the circus and last panel she's sitting ringside with the bank manager with icecreams for the both of them.

It reads like a webcomic in the paper (complete with Topatoco merch) except it also feels like a real continuation of Bushmiller's work. It sounds like the syndicate is broadly happy with how it's gone, as well.

And honestly it's kind of funny that the first webcomic person to break through on the funny papers was Olivia Jaimes and not Scott Kurtz, because I know how fucking badly he wanted it
posted by Merus at 6:38 PM on November 26, 2018 [10 favorites]

There was a period where Olivia Jaimes was doing the weekday strips and the weekend strips were rerun Guy Gilchrist (probably to help ease the former into producing 7 strips a week, as alluded to in the interview) and dear reader, it was not pleasant to go back and forth between the old and the new.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia

I think it was in some Calvin & Hobbes collection where Watterson mentioned that Sunday color strips had a huge lead time compared to the B&W weekday strips (a month or more), so it was rarely worth the effort to incorporate them into weekday strip storylines because of the advance planning required. So I suspect that's what was up with that.
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:52 PM on November 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

and dear reader, it was not pleasant to go back and forth between the old and the new.

I actually initially wondered if that was Jaimes doing a particularly vicious parody of Gilchrist. But no, the Gilchrist ones were just really embarrassingly bad.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:01 PM on November 26, 2018 [5 favorites]

My brain read this as "Cathy", and I was super-duper confused for a bit...


Irving is decidedly not lit.
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 7:19 PM on November 26, 2018 [16 favorites]

Aw, it's been a long time since I've thought about Neopets. Poor one out for my poor Aisha who has surely perished of starvation.
posted by arcticwoman at 7:22 PM on November 26, 2018

Apparently it was impossible for Neopets to actually die, so Aisha may still be there, waiting patiently for you to come back.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:50 PM on November 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

These are so good, how are they so good
posted by Existential Dread at 7:51 PM on November 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

I can't imagine (mostly because comics are Not Really A Thing where I live) how it feels when such a fossilized part of your pop culture suddenly comes to life and sparkles. I can't even think of anything comparable, most of pop culture icons don't reach this age.

The recent Mickey Mouse shorts almost get there, they're better than I'd have ever expected Mickey to be again until he finally went public domain in some far off future. But yeah, Nancy is on another level.
posted by jason_steakums at 8:03 PM on November 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

But no, the Gilchrist ones were just really embarrassingly bad.

Come on! “Whisperin’ Bill Anderson Fan Club” is always a great punchline.
posted by hwyengr at 8:14 PM on November 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

Aisha may still be there, waiting patiently for you to come back

... you monster
posted by Nelson at 9:05 PM on November 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

Thanks for posting the interview, I liked hearing from her about how she's thinking about it. I really like this:

And you have her learning robotics.
Yeah! I realized that all of the nouns that Nancy used to have are being supplanted by a phone. Things that she would have lying around the house to make up a joke are gone. She uses megaphones for a ton of things in Bushmiller’s strips, and I don’t have megaphones lying around my house. So how, then, can Nancy solve problems, given that technology is advancing to the point where problems are being solved in really nonphysical ways? That’s why I’m making her learn robotics. It opens up a wider range of visual gags to make down the line.

posted by LobsterMitten at 9:08 PM on November 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

My brain read this as "Cathy", and I was super-duper confused for a bit...

This reminds me suddenly that I had a sort of fever dream the other night where I was in-dream really convinced I should do a series of portraits of comic characters as realistic representational portraits of normal humans but with appropriate word balloons, something like that. It was a weirdly productive, cohesive idea as my dreams go.

When I woke up I lost most of whatever specific ideas I might have had in the dream but I do remember thinking a little bit about a portrait of a normal human woman with disheveled black hair throwing her hands up and shouting and the word balloon says "ACK!" and dammit maybe I should actually try it.
posted by cortex at 9:38 PM on November 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

normal human woman Tina Fey channels Cathy
posted by roger ackroyd at 9:58 PM on November 26, 2018 [7 favorites]

I love the new Nancy. It's the only comic I follow on Twitter. Olivia Jaimes is really funny. She maintained the physical punchline aspect of it while completely bringing it into the 21st century. I like how there's endless robotics class jokes. I like the cool auntie. I like all of it. Rebooted Nancy is lit!

This book is a fascinating, lavish, exhaustive investigation of the old Nancy:
How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels

I skimmed it but thoroughly enjoyed the pages and pages of plunger jokes

It's probably because I'm a beautiful genius. Perhaps the most beautiful genius of all
posted by jcruelty at 10:16 PM on November 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

Aah, I just binge-read all of Nancy since April! I dipped into the old Bushmiller oeuvre some years back and really liked it, and I agree that New Nancy feels like its spiritual successor. Thanks so much for posting about it! I don't ever see the funny pages anymore and I'm glad this didn't escape my notice.
posted by potrzebie at 11:28 PM on November 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

I’ve only seen a few of the rebooted Nancy’s and I’m surprised: at least a third of them are funny. That’s a really high proportion—I used to figure one laugh-out-loud strip per week was well above average in the paper, back when there was such a thing. It really feels like an actual web comic in the paper.

I think reason it works is that the typical web comic can’t run in the paper because of “issues” that the author is freed from dealing with on the web, but the secretive Nancy artist lady is creative enough that she has sufficient fresh material even after ditching all the dick jokes. Long may she reign!
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 5:50 AM on November 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

It has a sort of Peanuts feel to it, maybe because she's added characters and they seem kind of interesting in their own right. Nancy is very Lucy-like in some ways, but grumpy instead of rageful.

I dunno, it's good. I'm sad it's too soon for there to be a collected book of these strips because my kid would like them.
posted by emjaybee at 8:53 AM on November 27, 2018 [6 favorites]

Thanks for putting me on blast, Nancy
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:19 AM on November 27, 2018 [9 favorites]

I just started reading through the new run from the beginning, and since the site shows you the top comment, also reading through the complaints about the new strip (and especially its focus on tech). And then I saw this Sunday strip and it slayed me. This lady knows her shit.
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:24 AM on November 27, 2018 [10 favorites]

a collected book of these strips because my kid would like them.

I don't know how old your kid is but my then 8 year old really liked the Drawn & Quarterly reprint featuring selections from the John Stanley written comic books.
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:35 AM on November 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

I, too, love the new Nancy with a fierce protectiveness. Although it's generally great, I think the moment I was certain it's not just the new voice but that Jaimes really is a comedy genius is when I saw this strip.
posted by JHarris at 10:45 AM on November 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

I love the structure of this one.
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:51 PM on November 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

I love the structure of this one.

Also, the featured comment and response below it are just so pure:

Bobtul07110
OK, sorry! I’m 69 and decidedly un-techie. What the hell does this mean??!!!

jhnnywalkr
Sluggo didn’t reply to her text message, but she can tell he read it because sometimes your text messaging system tells you when your message has been seen by the recipient. Rather than just replying, Sluggo went through a lot of time and trouble to appear to have his gotten his hands stuck in jars, rendering them useless. Sluggo did this just so he can use that as an excuse for not typing a reply in an attempt to avoid Nancy’s wrath.

It’s a convoluted scheme for a very simple social misstep.

Bobtul07110
Thanx!

posted by mhum at 1:55 PM on November 27, 2018 [17 favorites]

It’s a convoluted scheme for a very simple social misstep.

everysitcom.jpeg

Alternately.

Metafilter: It's a convoluted etc. etc.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:58 PM on November 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

Also, even though I know it's highly unlikely, I like to imagine that Olivia Jaimes is Allie Brosh (from Hyperbole and a Half).
posted by mhum at 2:47 PM on November 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

clearly she is Elena Ferrante
posted by roger ackroyd at 3:42 PM on November 27, 2018 [10 favorites]

Not-really-related, but I'm just blown away that the new author has been doing the strip since the April of THIS YEAR. I remember the previous thread in which the change in authorship was announced, but in subjective time that was like three or four years ago.
posted by gauche at 11:25 AM on November 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

uhh this one speaks to me so much
posted by numaner at 2:41 PM on November 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

I'm just going to throw in my guess here: Olivia Jaimes is Dorothy Gambrell, creator of Cat and Girl. If I'm right, I can point to this post and claim my Mefi points.
posted by suetanvil at 5:21 AM on November 29, 2018 [8 favorites]

All y'all's guesses are way better than mine. *starts unpinning string and taking down pictures from a bulletin board in the middle of an empty bullpen.*
posted by muddgirl at 7:43 PM on November 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

I’ve really liked Olivia Jaimes’ Nancy since it began but the moment I went from fan to FAN is when I read the September 13th strip. Actually, it was when I read it the second time and got it. Such a brilliantly subtle and hilarious gag.
posted by Kattullus at 2:52 AM on November 30, 2018

Nancy, December 23rd, 2018
XKCD, December 24th, 2018
posted by vibratory manner of working at 9:52 PM on December 23, 2018 [4 favorites]

I posit that Randall Munroe is secretly Olivia Jaimes at least 1-2 days a week.
posted by numaner at 11:36 PM on December 25, 2018