Nancy, Revisited

Back here, I wrote a little bit about the comic strip, Nancy. I have a lot of affection for this strip, at least as it was originally drawn. Part of this is due to the strip itself, but part of it is due, like so many things (for me), to nostalgia.

Other than a few recent times before that post, I hadn't read the strip since I was a kid. But as I mentioned in the post, I had a conversation with Rachael, and later, she gave me some old Nancy comic books for Christmas. Those comics sparked my interest once again, and in turn, it led me to buy some books of reprinted newspaper strips from the original run (published by Fantagraphics). Beyond that though, reading the strip is nothing that I particularly pursue.

Still, if I happen to come across an old strip, I read it and I enjoy it - and I continue to look upon the strip with fondness. It's feels a little like visiting my old home town and finding that things had stayed pretty much as I had remembered. At least, that’s the way it is for me when I read a strip from that early era.

When the creator of the strip passed away, it's my understanding that it was taken over by someone who continued on with the same look and feel of the original run. I'm not sure how long that went on for, but I know that in more recent years, the strip was produced by a couple of different artists. And while theirs may have been perfectly fine strips, their styles were different enough from the original that the few times I stumbled across them, they held no interest for me.

I bring all of this up because the other day, an article about Nancy came up in my news feed. If you don’t bother to read the article (but you should), the gist of it is that recently, another new artist has taken over the strip - and as expected, some people aren’t happy about it. More surprising to me though, is that some people are.

Along with enjoying the article, I also enjoyed the reader comments (400 of them, at the time of this posting). I often avoid reading the comments because too many times the "discussion" seems to devolve into people hurling insults at each other. I don't necessarily have a problem with this, as long as someone's being a bit clever about it - and as long as they happen to agree with my point of view - but if they're just being nasty for the sake of being nasty, I'm not interested. For the most part, I found these comments to be pretty entertaining.

Anyway, I've read a few of the new strips and I've enjoyed most of what I've seen. In this case, the old home town may have changed a bit, but there's enough there that it still has much of it's original charm. And for me, at least, that makes it worth revisiting.