Comics Review – Nancy: A Comic Collection by Olivia Jaimes

This is the first collection of the daily Nancy strip since new author Olivia Jaimes took over. I rarely read strips, and had read zero Nancy strips before this, only having been exposed to Jaimes’ work on Nancy through social media.

I have nothing bad to say about this book. It was great. It’s one of the best things I’ve read in a long while and was a really unique reading experience. Jaimes’ strips are creative, witty, frequently meta, and there’s nothing else like them. The gags almost never fail to land. It’s been my experience with daily strips that something like 1 in 5 is legitimately funny and the rest is somewhat enjoyable filler. The ratio is flipped here, and then some.

In the interview with the author at the back of the book, the interviewer describes Nancy in these strips as an avatar for the reader who lives in the modern world and is very online. That’s about a good as description as any. For example, the characters are on their phones all the time, then feel bad about it, then go back to being on their phone anyway. Nancy soliloquizes on why social media is bad, only to say she just needs to make sure to type up her thoughts to post on social media. It felt like reading an encapsulation of all the things that the older generations always whine about when they talk about millenials, but are just facts of life for those growing up in this era.

I take back my earlier point…there are two bad things about this book:
1. That it ended.
2. That Olivia Jaimes is a pen-name, with Nancy as her only published work, so I can’t read anything else she’s done until the next Nancy collection comes out!

Until then, Sluggo is lit!