Besides the joke just not being funny, compare the movement and flow of the characters from the first artist to the second. See how Jerry Scott's characters look so alive and full of cartoonish energy when Olivia Jaimes version seems so static.
Its a full 5 steps back
Yeah, it's a far cry, even if you were trying to do Bushmiller's finest, it should at least feel like effort (of course Bushmiller's Nancy was very much about "Less is More" the way he did it).
Yeah, but I think she's trying to do what Ernie Bushmiller was doing, and he was pretty stiff. (It looks like a mix between Bushmiller and Roz Chast, kind of.) At least Nancy still looks like herself.
Certainly (Sluggo as well I feel, be interesting though about Aunt Fritzi if she's ever shown again)
Note that the bottom version of Nancy was denigrated when it ran in papers.
Yeah, it was a very different take on the characters, yet Scott managed to keep that going for a decade before Gilchrist took it over and did his own thing.
It's not the worst I've seen. It's just that... it lost some charm. The jokes feel very modern, and probably won't age very well. And self awareness can be funny, but it's kind of a cheap laugh. Something amusing. It'll provide maybe a exhale, but won't make you smile.
It's kind of empty feeling.
I think Bushmiller's Nancy managed to stood the test of time by not trying to stay relevant. It's its own universe where time didn't matter much, of course further studies on this have already been detailed in the book
"How To Read Nancy", which is worth everyone's time!
I'll admit I kind of chuckled at the Snapchat filter one. But, while I was vaguely aware of the character growing up from parodies of the strip in Cracked, I don't remember the Montreal Gazette ever carrying Nancy so it's not like Olivia Jaimes is ruining any of my own personal childhood memories by being too "modern" and "self-aware".
My paper did, at least up through Jerry Scott's tenure (the first time I saw Nancy at all) and simply dropped it for something else in the 90's.
The joke about the teacher being a secret gamer is almost like a Lucky Star gag (except that teacher isn't exactly secretive about it).
It was amusing. Still this is the first couple weeks and I'm sure after a while we'll get use to Jaimes' Nancy just fine.
I've never even heard of Nancy before today, that's not real surprising because I grew up in a small city in South Dakota (not some farming community, mind, we were a proper city) so as you can imagine the comic section wasn't very big. We did have the staples though, like Peanuts, Garfield, and Family Circus (ick).
How about
Cappy Dick? That was always in my Sunday paper before Professor Doodles showed up.
Granted when we moved to a significantly larger city there weren't many more comics and this paper didn't even have Peanuts or Garfield back in 1999 (no idea if they had gotten rid of them sometime prior to arriving or if they ever carried them at all) so I don't know.
Oddly mine puts
For Better or For Worse right on the first page on top of the Sunday edition where Peanuts once hailed for decades (Peanuts is like page 2 or 3 now, I think, and Garfield is wherever they feel like it).
In terms of Nancy alone, I suppose they hadn't gotten too far in terms of marketing/promotion of the series, though several attempts at animating her had been done, including two WWII-era cartoons from Terrytoons and as a segment in several Filmation shows in the 70's.
