Olivia Jaimes was Hiding in a Storage Closet

 

On a Sunday afternoon in September, Olivia Jaimes was hiding in a storage closet at the Columbus Metropolitan Library in Columbus, Ohio. She’d been in there for two hours, watching episodes of The Good Place on her laptop and dressed like a chic fugitive — sunglasses, hair beneath a hoodie, face obscured by a scarf. In a few minutes, she would emerge to greet a crowd of admirers as the closing act of the Cartoon Crossroads Columbus comic convention, her first and only public appearance to date.

Abraham Riesman, for New York Magazine, profiles Olivia Jaimes,
as much as one can profile someone who refuses to be profiled.

On the rare occasions when she gives interviews, they’re almost always via email; otherwise, as in the case of one radio appearance and one brief YouTube interview, she has demanded that her voice be distorted. If you do manage to arrange a phone chat, the device she’s calling from obscures her number. She even refuses to answer questions about her pseudonymity.

 

Abraham had the opportunity to “meet” with Olivia recently by way of a phone interview.

They discussed her appearance at that CXC in September:

[with the] demand that all attendees surrender their phones at the door. However, she did allow one form of recording. As audience member and fellow cartoonist R. Sikoryak recalls, “Someone said, ‘You can draw her, but she asks that you draw her badly.’?”

above: R. Sikoryak draws Olivia

 

They discussed her take on Nancy:

Jaimes is inclined to agree, saying her comic is “#relatable” — and here I detect a sideways irony in her voice as she pronounces the word hashtag.

Abraham talks to both Olivia and John Glynn about her becoming the Nancy cartoonist.

Glynn happened to follow Jaimes on social media, where she posts under a different name — he won’t say what that name is, of course, or how he came to follow her — and saw her posting about how much she loved Bushmiller’s work. She had a web comic of her own — again, Glynn won’t divulge what it is — and he had an editor reach out to see if she’d try her hand at “Nancy.” Jaimes sent two weeks’ worth of test strips, Glynn was blown away, and she was swiftly hired.

Abraham’s article appears in the November 12, 2018, issue of New York Magazine.

Or read it online here.*

 

*Better get there quickly, as David Beard tells us toward the bottom of this page:

New York Magazine is the latest company to announce a paywall, $5 a month, leading to the question: How many sites will a person pay for? And does that total include monthly media billings for WiFi, cell service, Spotify, and video streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon? And what about “cause-based” media nonprofits?