NANCY.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: COMICS - Brief article

In its glory days, when it was written and drawn by Ernie Bushmiller, Nancy walked the fine line that separates genius from idiocy. The newspaper comic was as inane as a dad joke and as beguiling as a Zen /roan; the best path to enjoying it, and perhaps to attaining enlightenment, lay in embracing the fact that you weren't ever sure whether it was the smartest or stupidest thing in the paper.

The cartoon lost that spirit after Bushmiller died in 1982, as a series of successors churned out an ever-blander pod-person facsimile of his creation. But now a new writer-artist, the pseudonymous Olivia Jaimes, has taken over, fusing Bushmiller's sensibility with the similarly smart-dumb ethos of Weird Twitter. There are more jokes about social media now, but the...