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Comic History Comic Strips

Nancy is Lit

Published: December 3, 2025 1 minute 6 comments
Nancy debuts in the Fritzi Ritz comic strip – January 2, 1933

The resurgence of Nancy takes another step forward next month when Caroline Cash takes control of the ninety-three year old comic strip star.

New life invigorated the Nancy comic strip when the anonymous Olivia Jaimes took over in 2018 to varied response from rejection to high praise, with the praise getting most of the media’s attention.

Zippy the Pinhead by Bill Griffith – September 20, 2025

The Bushmiller Society has refused to accept any of the half dozen cartoonists that have taken over the comic strip in the 43 years since creator Ernie Bushmiller died. But Jaimes’ Nancy brought a renewed interest to the character and the comic strip. And following that revival came publishers. Books reprinting Bushmiller Nancy strips and a Bushmiller graphic biography have been issued in the past few years.

Beyond the increased popularity and more diverse readership of the daily strip, “Nancy” was the subject of an extraordinary biographical graphic novel in 2023. One of the most notable comics-related books of the past few years, “Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, The Man Who Created Nancy” is part biography, part comics anthology and part multiverse fantasy.

Griffith and Cash aren’t the only “Nancy” revivalists. Last year, Sunday Press Books published “The Nancy Show,” a book-length celebration of “Nancy” that served as the catalogue for an in-depth art exhibit at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in Ohio. “Nancy and Sluggo’s Guide to Life,” a reworking of several “Nancy” anthologies from the 1980s, was released last year by New York Review Books, a publishing company related to the New York Review of Books periodical.

Now there’s a new “Nancy” collection, “Nancy Wears Hats,” from one of the most important publishers of books of comics, Fantagraphics Books in Seattle, Washington. Fantagraphics, which also published the “How to Read to Nancy” book

Christopher Arnott for The Hartford Courant looks at with Nancy’s past, present, and future.

Nancy by Caroline Cash – July 24, 2024

I don’t expect The Bushmiller Society to accept Caroline Cash’s version of the characters anymore than they did her previous non-Bushmiller predecessors. For the rest of us we will wait and see how Caroline tackles the comic strip on a long term basis beginning January 1, 2026.

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Comments 6

  1. Sorry, but Nancy discussion always winds up looking to me like the comments on any MeTV-associated Facebook post (there is currently apocalyptic levels of angst right now over the decision to run “Everybody Loves Raymond” in the evening even though they’ve already cycled through the complete run of “Hogan’s Heroes” at least 3 times.)

    The Bushmiller Nancies are really clever and, thankfully, the existence of the Jaimes version (which I also liked quite a lot) has no effect whatsoever on any prior iteration. The same will be true of the new version—you can actually (gasp!) enjoy all of them! Or just one! It’s not that big a deal!

  2. I grew up reading Bushmiller’s “Nancy”, and continued reading the strip even into my college years. I never liked any of his next four successors, but not because of the change in the artwork: what I detested was the cloying sappiness that pervaded both Scott’s and Gilchrist’s writing. Jaimes was much better: she gave the strip a new, fresher look, and was much more inventive in composing original ideas for the strip. I did not like the “mystery” of her pseudonymous authorship, but even bad publicity is still publicity, and the moronic hotheads who complained about the new art, the pseudonym, or even the fact that the syndicate was handing the job to (“horrors!“) a woman were all key factors in improving the visibility of the syndicate’s property. If Gilchrist had been replaced by a dutiful Bushmiller clone, the strip would have remained just as irrelevant as it had been for the preceding three decades, and nobody would be talking about it now.

    1. I didn’t see the pseudonym as a “mystery” so much as a necessary protective measure. Every woman on the internet recognizes this.

  3. I always liked Nancy’s or sSluggo’s weird cousin Oona. the stories with her always veered off into strange outre directions,and truth be told left Nancy in the rearview mirror.

    1. Oona was a character created by John Stanley in the Dell “Nancy” comic book.

  4. Nancy not drawn by Bushmiller (or proxies) in the Bushmiller years isn’t real Nancy.

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