It was the waning days of 2017, and Andrews McMeel was looking to make a change. The venerable comic “Nancy” had been around for eight decades, and the syndicate was seeking to give the once-highly popular strip a creative transfusion with some new blood.
But where to turn?
The answer was a turn to artist Olivia Jaimes, as this nifty one-year-later update from The Washington Post makes clear. Since taking over a fading 85-year-old comic character in 2018, Jaimes has turned Nancy into a rising star that now appears in nearly 140 newspapers and has seen a 400% spike in online traffic.
The serendipity of the “Sluggo is lit” meme was a huge kick-start, of course, but James has kept things rolling with a series of daily strips that are by turns funny, bizarre, or Kardashian-era thought experiments.
Nancy is her own girl, but she’s also a Gen-AA Lucy Van Pelt, complete with bossy delusions of grandeur. (It’s not hard to imagine her pulling the football away from Sluggo, complete with philosophical justification.) In any case, the strip under James has a lot more going on than just giving phones to Nancy and Sluggo. Awesome.
Nancy and Artist Olivia Jaimes Continue to Make the Comics Pages ‘Lit’ One Year In »