Nancy by Olivia Jaimes for May 16, 2021

The moral of the story is that you gotta remember to fix the fourth wall when you’re finished with your shenanigans.

The Firesign Theater asked in 1969 the eternal question…

How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All?

Here’s Nancy’s answer. One resonance with their album is that they state at the end of side 2 their intent to “go back to the other side of the record.” Nancy has built a reality where she can do that.

So there’s more than one way to bend the space/time continuum. That’s especially tricky for comic strip characters because their reality is woven of a series of leaps (panel to panel) between clearly different places and moments, whereas in a continuum, adjacent elements of time or space are almost indistinguishable from one another… but somehow widely separated ones can be drastically different.

Einstein himself was deeply troubled by the idea that a thing could be in two places at once or in two different energy states simultaneously even though those realities were logical outcomes of what was then understood about quantum states. He changed his mind for/against and against/for a few times.

But in the last ten or eleven years, the two energy states condition has been created in the lab, and it has been demonstrated that information (but not yet physical objects) can be generated in one place but operate simultaneously in two fifferent places.

But, golly, Nancy is some kind of Wizard, to put it simply. She could give those Hogwarts kids (and teachers) a run for their money. It’s her universe, we just live in it.

I wanted to make a “now you’re thinking with Portals” joke but then I remembered it’s not 2007 any more.

And, haha, when La Nance attempts to exit stage right with the cokie jar… she is chagrined to find herself entering from stage left with the cookie jar. So Auntie still has the last laugh. Except for ours, haha.

Moebius called.

I don’t want to go without noting that painting of the duck, too.

It’s also worth noting that parts of Nancy’s arms and hands are in three different places as she reaches for the cookie jar in panel 5. Also one foot exits as it also enters on opposite sides of the last panel.

Is there another comic strip creator working today that can compete with this level of complexity, especially with as economically few lines?

In panel 1, she is looking at a picture of a panel that doesn’t exist! And she uses it to fold space! For a “getting caught stealing cookies” gag! I expect the people who can’t be happy won’t be happy about this strip, but my mind was blown.

Great. Now I have to run out and get a printer.

So is today’s moral, what goes around comes around?

Hmm…. I kind of think I am gettting most of this today…. with the creation of a 360 degree panorama…… but I must say I am not really understanding the significance of a green exclamation mark above Nancy’s head in the last panel. I am assuming it is in relation to Aunt Fritzi’s exclamation mark….. due to Aunt Fritzi seeing Nancy with the cookie jar…. but why green? And in another way, with the 360 arc, wouldn’t it have worked better if Nancy had gone in the opposite direction in the circle? Maybe I’m not getting this at all. (Sigh)

This is so genius. It’s all about the concept of multiple dimensions — currently Nancy lives in a 2D world but depending on how you fold the dimensions over it would result in the panels shown above.If an entity from a 4D world were to enter our world we would only see slices of it and not understand the entity in its full spectrum because we can only see depth, height, and width.Just like Nancy would only see us as slices as we enter a 2D world — she perceives only height and width but not depth.I congratulate the artist for such a funny and stimulating comic.

Topography.

Evidently, Poochie, the mastermind and brains of the operation, as well as the most intelligent character in the Nancyverse, advised Nancy as to how to accomplish the actions in the first four panels. Then, by the fifth panel, Nancy attempted to come up with an exit strategy on her on, and she ended up in quite the kerfuffle.

Wow, references to both Pac-Man and Metal Gear in one strip. Nice scheme, Nancy.

Nancy, are you OK? Nancy?! NANCYYYYY!!!!

GAME OVER

Oops!

Clever. :)

Superb