After warning her fans that she would be taking a Summer sabbatical Olivia Jaimes has gone on vacation.
Today’s Sunday Nancy page shows Leigh Luna taking on the cartooning chores as the first of a round robin of women creators to do a few weeks of Nancy comic strips while the pseudonymous Jaimes either rejuvenates her creative juices or takes on another project under her real identity.
As noted here last month Olivia and Andrews McMeel have lined up a roster of women to take on Nancy this Summer, though a number of the reports had the Symposium of Cartoonists starting in late July not late June.
So is this just a tease? Has Olivia really left the building? Will Luna or Olivia or another be there tomorrow?
Time will tell.
Caroline Cash, Shaenon K. Garrity, and Megan McKay have also been named as Summer substitutes.
Guy Gilchrist was the truest to at least what the characters looked like. They should have ended after he left.
Yeah, not a fan of the look.
Slavishly copying Bushmiller’s artwork is ridiculous. Nancy is a zombie strip, owned by the syndicate. Either you approve permitting new artists putting a modern spin on the characters, or you don’t, but in the latter case you should simply stop reading it. One might as well require the current artists for Blondie or Gasoline Alley to return to the “original” form of the characters from 80 years ago.
Or if another artist did Peanuts in a rebooted comic strip style if it was approved by the estate of Charles Schulz about 25 years after Schulz’s death.
If you check GoComics today (June 24th) the comic Nancy is missing.
It was there this morning and it is there now. https://www.gocomics.com/nancy
It’s blank now.
It’s you, not them.
As Bill Watterson so succinctly put it, “If you’re good enough to do someone else’s strip, you should be good enough to do your own.”
But Wiley – Opper helped on The Katzenjammer Kids. Before Terry and the Pirates Caniff took over Colonel Gilfeather from Al Capp (before Abner) who had followed creator Dick Dorgan. Sickles went with Scorchy Smith instead of his own creation. Plenty of great cartoonists went with something other.
And with these substitutions being a syndicate deal not a Jaimes operation it is getting their feet in the door for maybe future syndication of their own comics.
As I recall J. D. Crowe put in a two week sub on Non Sequitur before he got his No Huddle comic.
There’s a rather sizable difference between sitting in two weeks as vacation replacement and taking over a feature of a long dead cartoonist. In fact, there is no comparison between the two.
That’s what they should do, especially if they’re going to completely change the strip. The syndicate should give Olivia Jaimes and Jools their own strip instead of having them turn an existing strip into a completely different one. I’m excepting Steenz, since Tatulli chose her as a replacement.
I think they do it so they keep the newspapers the strip is in. But if I ran a newspaper, the practice would make me furious.