Nancy by Olivia Jaimes for May 17, 2018

Enough the tech savvy Nancy,It’s getting old fast!

That’s the biggest change in my life – we are awash in information.

I cannot help but think Stewart Brand was ahead of his time in this respect.

She only needs to see her old self to know how it was like. Imagine that.

The advantage of growing up in India…

The internet only hit India in the early 2000s, and I am still not yet thirty but able to remember the days of dial-up.

Even before then, I remember public libraries and looking up information. (Luckily, my old school had – and still has – a supremely stocked one which is still in use, which I perused diligently – a habit which continued into college.)

Really, the petulant nature of today’s youth and the smartphone revolution really gets to me at times. I feel aged before my time.

I think it was a mistake for Guy to give this up. Still, if they’d given the contract to the woman behind littleteacup.net, this would have gone on so much better.

Oh, I do remember life before the Internet. After all, I’ve been around since 1960!

Now we know why the teacher put Nancy in the corner.

I bet she used Google to find out how to make that desk levitate.

Those are not shading lines.

Beware the school cat with claws.

Cornbread, however, is eternal.

Why is Nancy the only student in the room???

I can remember briefly a time before the internet was so widespread. Before I discovered anything and everything the internet offered I was engrossed in my Barbie and Winnie the Pooh computer games on CD ROM.

And computers that were plain and boxy.

5

A nice offering. However, the one incongruity that distracted me a bit was the teacher’s line “It can be hard to remember what life was like before the Internet.” While the line is true (presumably) for the teacher….. as for the new Nancy…. she would have had her whole, young life in the midst of the Internet Revolution. My take is that she would NOT know any other experience to remember.

So, when I first read what the teacher said, I was anticipating Nancy to offer some sort of sarcastic reply attesting to the idea that she cannot remember anything before the Internet. With this not occurring, it distracted me a bit from today’s punchline.

The punchline, however (“We can always Google it.”) is a good one. Search engines have had profound impacts on our lives. Both for good…. and for not so good. The irony, though, of using Google to try to learn about life prior to search engines…. pretty good and ironic.

As long as Nancy has been aroun d – she would know!

@JOSH LYONS: You are a mere pup, young ’un….

The internet self populates popular culture. The unpopular and boring have large holes and shadows

Unfortunately the truth of history is being eroded at a rapid pace.

Those sky-blue shoes have got to go.

Lots of fake information!

It’s not really a joke. Students are now being told not to bother learning anything, since everything can be googled. All they’re being taught is better googling skills.

I see in panel two the non Nancyverse teacher’s hand looks like one that would hold a pizza slice in the Funkyverse.

His hands have looked a little weird every day, actually. Maybe he should be wearing Mutt & Jeff white gloves.

The new Nancy rules!

I don’t exactly criticize “Jaimes” for wanting to update Nancy, but for the way she’s doing it. I’m fairly certain Bushmiller already understood that, once he put Nancy to paper (back in 1933), Nancy would quickly become yesterday’s news. So what did he do to make a not-so-fresh character somewhat fresh every day?

Well, several things. But mainly, Ernie made the strip FUNNY. He also made Nancy and the rest highly-expressive. He even made household pets little “wise-guys” that out-shined their owners, as well as scene-stealing toddler Pee Wee Brown.

Ernie’s theater was always “lively”, not sleepy and placid, and every day was either a small comic jab at progress or a tiny memorial by which to check ourselves by…

All of which point to an undercurrent depth of second-hand reality and historicity, cleverly hidden by the jokes and and a perfectly-simple, artistic style rarely updated.

So what?

Nancy was always about taking a fresh look at history – - sometimes pitting our historical understanding against modernity, many times fumbling our way to progress slowly and laughing at ourselves knowing we won’t arrive at perfection.

Just how “old” was Bushmiller when he created Nancy? He was 28. Back then, a typical 28-year- old was like 50 today, full of life and wisdom and ready to share with hilarity and poig[nancy].

Nancy and history are our friends, and the rest of us have a long way to go.