Pseudonymous Olivia Jaimes remains Pseudonymous

From Vice.com comes an article about The Woman Behind Nancy [who] Has Made an 80-Year-Old Comic Funny Again.

The long-running comic was recently taken over by Olivia Jaimes, who’s shifted the focus from boomer humor to jokes about Snapchat, apps, and Twitter bots.

Author Grant Pardee, for Vice, says Nancy is

for the first time since the Eisenhower administration, actually good.

[finding] new life under Olivia Jaimes, the pseudonym for the first female cartoonist to write and draw the daily comic in its 80 year history.

Like a superhero the current Nancy creator has a secret identity.
Unlike most superheroes her secret identity remains secret.

The new article gives hints, but only hints, as to who Olivia is in interviews with Andrews McMeel president John Glynn:

“We had known and liked Olivia’s work as a web cartoonist, and found out she was a huge Nancy fan, so we queried her,” Glynn told me. “After we got back her samples, we felt that we had found the right person.”

It’s a mystery as to which web comics she previously published, though. “If it was up to me, I’d rather use her real name,” Glynn said. “Her fans would’ve been incredible advocates, but she wants to keep her two lives separate, and we respect that.”

As for email interviews with Jaimes:

“I’m a pretty private person and I want to be insulated from the whole ‘Big Thing’ that a classic comic strip is,” Jaimes said of the pseudonym, speaking to the New York Times. “The pseudonym lets me do that, and I’m really grateful for it.”

“Nancy is the only legacy strip I would have even considered taking on,” Jaimes told me. “For any other, the cons—it’s somebody else’s baby, there will be grumblers—would have easily outweighed the pros.”

The strip has gained a new wave of supporters (“social engagement on the strip has gone up more than 500 percent”), not the least of which is author Grant:

Besides the new look and nouns used, the takeaway here is that Nancy is funny again. Jaimes has succeeded in returning the original minimalist spirit to the comic, but surpasses it with far greater talent and sensibility.

For his part, Glynn told [Grant] his team had nothing but confidence in Jaimes. “Olivia is the only person who could’ve done it, to bring the Bushmiller style and the 21st century together. The sensibilities fit together perfectly,” he said.

A good story about the new Nancy comic strip and her new creator, who remains anonymous.

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