Nancy Wins at Friendship by Olivia Jaimes

Nancy Wins at Friendship is the second collection of the Olivia Jaimes era of that long-running newspaper strip; it was published in 2023 but seems to mostly reprint strips from the 2019-2020 era. Jaimes took over the strip in 2018, and her first collection, just called Nancy, came out less than a year later - in some world where newspaper comic strip collections are things "the kids" buy and read and crave, there could have been eight or ten books this length by now.

But the whole point of the early Olivia Jaimes Nancy is that "kids these days" are different. So that's not just a counterfactual, but one that directly contradicts the work itself.

I wrote about the first book about six months ago: those strips were a shock, in a good way, back in 2018. The Guy Gilchrist version of Nancy had been slowly losing newspapers for years as it sunk deeper into its own dull mix of sappy sentimentalism and incongruous good-girl art, and there was no serious hope that a legacy strip - especially one so closely identified with its creator, Ernie Bushmiller, and his mania for simple, precise gags - would break out of the straitjacket of the syndicate's hand and ever do anything interesting.

We were wrong. Unlike so many things this last decade or so, we we actually wrong by being too pessimistic, so Nancy is one small hopeful lesson for the world. Nancy was rejuvenated by a younger, female, pseudonymous creator - we still don't know who "Olivia Jaimes" really is, though it mostly doesn't matter; whatever she did before, this Nancy is her best-known and probably most-sustained work - first as a big signpost to say "this is going to be different now."

But the "Sluggo Is Lit" era - awesome as it was - settled down. That wasn't what Jaimes was planning to do, long-term: it was more of a clean break from the Gilchrist years, a way to grab attention and draw a line in the sand, to say her Nancy would be over here from now on.

This book shows what Jaimes wanted to focus Nancy on: still smart gags every day - she's enough of a fan of Bushmiller that isn't negotiable - but embedded in a more realistic modern world, with the phones and tech (and, yes, some language from the kids) that the early strips made such a point of. But Jaimes also added a new supporting cast around Nancy in school - friends, teachers supportive and struggling, a rival - to widen out this world.

It's a more grounded strip, as odd as that might seem from the first few months. More grounded than Gilchrist, more grounded than Bushmiller, frankly: Bushmiller was always a minimalist, paring everything down to a single focused gag in each individual strip, and happy to throw away all continuity and consistency to make that day's gag better. Jaimes's aims are slightly different: she still has Nancy as a self-centered, appetite-driven little kid, but the fact that she's smart and clever and good at working out quirky ideas - all traits core to her since the beginning - are more important, and connect to this mostly normal school life.

So Nancy, improbably, became largely a kids-in-school strip, about lessons and robotics club and rivalries with the other elementary schools. This is the book collecting the strips where that largely happened: this is the middle of that twist. It's a good strip, still full of fun gags, though Jaimes is much fonder of the ironic verbal reversal than Bushmiller's more visual eye.

I hope there are more books of Nancy; a lot has happened since the strips collected here. This one is largely a how-do-we-do-school-during-pandemic time-capsule at this point; I wonder why that was the book Andrews McMeel put out in 2023, but I suppose they figured they need to stay in order or the pandemic strips will just be too disjoint to ever use. But there are two Olivia Jaimes collections, which is pretty good: I recommend both of them, in the right order.