CSotD: Keep the Change
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Heart of the City wanders into the new Nancy hubbub.
For those who have been living under three rocks, the old strip was taken over a month ago, garnering a lot more attention than I would have expected, though GoComics did make a big deal out of it, and it coincided with publication of a book using the classic strip as a tool for analyzing comics.
Yesterday, the switchover became complete as the Sundays caught up with the dailies.
I've added Nancy to my daily diet, because I want to see where it goes over the next few months as Jaimes hits stride.
So far, it isn't cracking me up, but, then again, I'm not sure it's supposed to. In any case, I'm more amused by observing the process than by the cartoons themselves, but that'll do.
Reading the comments is interesting, because there were, as Heart suggests, some totally baffled readers, though there were also some people who leapt onto the Jaimes bandwagon way too early and eagerly. Hipsters, I suppose.
And a lot of people seem really concerned about skin tone, to the point where skin tone is becoming a "thing" in the comments, and, once commenters pick up on a "thing," there's not much you can do about it.
Though I suppose each time someone says "skin tone," you could say, "Slowly I turned …"
There's also a divide between people who are upset that Guy Gilchrist is no longer doing the strip and people who are upset that Ernie Bushmiller (1905-1982) is gone.
Gilchrist's version remained an understated strip in his 20 years at the helm, but went through a lot of changes nonetheless.
It was sentimental, was more structured as a standard kid-gag strip and had references to country music and God, neither of which Bushmiller touched on terribly often if at all.
Jaimes seems closer to the original, particularly in touching on current fads and fancies: In today's "Classic Nancy," commenters are having to explain to each other that a chow is a breed of dog with a purple tongue — something most people knew in 1955 — while a recent Jaimes' strip forced them to explain Snapchat filters to each other, something most young people, but not most old people, know in 2018.
There's the crucial difference in how the strip riffs on current things: So far, it has been strongly tied to social media and tech, rather than overall current interests, clearly playing to a young audience rather than a general one.
The new Nancy is also self-referential, which Classic Nancy never was, but, then again, I don't think any strips were self-referential back then and it's certainly a part of current humor for a younger generation.
Another change to keep in mind is that, while Nancy is no longer the giant she once was — having been in 900 papers in Bushmiller's day, now down to 75 — she's still part of an important aspect of the business, which is that syndicate comics are sold to editors, not to readers.
This means that the old favorites — Beetle and Nancy and Blondie — will continue in newspapers as long as they don't inspire reader uprisings.
But as cartoons shift to the online world and syndicates — particularly GoComics — begin to build business online, the individual reader has more control over what is being shown.
If you drill down in GoComics, you'll find a huge trove of cartoons that don't look like the Old Faithfuls and that you will never see in your local newspaper.
Some are truly awful, some haven't figured out the importance of keeping to a schedule, but others are clever, professional and consistently well-worth following.
The positive side of which is that your hometown newspaper's editor no longer dictates what you read over your morning coffee.
The negative side is that you can't get away with being a passive consumer of whatever is put before you: You have to get out there and look around.
The major negative to all this, however, is that the money side has yet to make the shift, such that a strip that doesn't appear in a good number of papers is more a labor of love than a way to make the rent and feed the kids.
Nancy is a good belwether: Its current 75 papers isn't going to put Olivia Jaimes in a beach house at Malibu, but it should make it worth her time to keep the strip going.
Meanwhile, change is coming, so don't touch that dial.
Assuming you know what a "dial" is.
Speaking of resisting change …
Paul Fell plays on traditional comics page gender rivalries to comment on the changes down at BSA. Others are more bent out of shape than bemused by the change.
I'm surprised, but only that it took so long.
When we were expecting our first, forty-six years ago, before ultrasounds identified sex ahead of time, I worried about having a little girl because of the struggles she'd face. We'd face.
However, by the time our son was two years old, Little League was coed and his soccer teams assumed little boys and girls would play together at least for the first several years.
By the time he enlisted in the Navy, he could have done much the same if he'd been my daughter.
But he was a father himself before the Scouts began to address their issues of religion and sexual orientation, never mind whether little girls could learn to tie a sheep shank.
I once got a kick out of saying I had three kids: A priest, a nurse and an elementary school teacher. The (Episcopal) priest was my stepdaughter, the nurse and the teacher were my sons.
But that no longer surprises anyone.
The battle is nearly over and we're just mopping up, in a world in which #MeToo ought to be, and will be, for old farts to sort out.
Y'know — the same ones who get upset when there's a change in skin tone.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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