(+++) REIMAGININGS

Nancy Wins at Friendship. By “Olivia Jaimes.” Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Heart of the City Collection #2: Lost and Found. By Steenz (Christina Stewart). Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

     The near-death of newspapers and specifically of their comic-strip pages, which have recently dwindled to almost nothing, have combined to accelerate a trend in which comics done on paper or in book form have metamorphosed into, in effect, screen captures of Internet work. The art has become increasingly simplistic, the characters created in line with whatever memes-of-the-moment are out there online, and the artists themselves, when it comes to continuations or revivals of longstanding strips, are pulled from the Internet world – with which they presumably are best able to communicate. It is easy to ask whether there is any point to all this: the newer versions of classic strips are generally less clever, less amusing, and altogether less engaging than the originals. But the fans of the originals have aged beyond the point of being a target audience for the purveyors of comics, and the targeting of younger readers who know only what they see online and whose expectations are formed by the meme world is sensible from a business perspective. And so we have ever-so-up-to-date versions of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy and Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City, each of them rethought to contain all the elements that are now de rigueur in visual communication: multiethnic, multiracial character groups, households headed by two women or two men, the preteen stirrings of same-gender sexuality, and so forth.

     So now – specifically since 2018 – Nancy is under the aegis of the pseudonymous “Olivia Jaimes,” a Web cartoonist who for no apparent reason chooses to remain anonymous. “Jaimes” has reimagined the deliberately bland appearance of Nancy for the Internet age, keeping the precocious eight-year-old as super-simple as always in drawing style but having her interact on a regular basis with modern technology. Jaimes is not a particularly good artist – she has difficulty drawing feet and even greater trouble with shoes, most of which look like cushy bedroom slippers; and her decision to give Aunt Fritzi tiny nostrils without a nose makes the character seem like a close relative of Lord Voldemort. Also in Nancy Wins at Friendship, there is a panel in which Nancy throws up her arms – which turn out to be disproportionately long – and one in which Fritzi rescues Nancy from a puddle and turns out to have decidedly nonhuman proportions. None of this matters, of course, since good art is not the point of the new Nancy. “Jaimes” sometimes tries a slightly clever approach to a panel, and this works about half the time: a “feedback” one with multiple panel overlays is not particularly well-done, but a four-panel sequence showing Nancy and Fritzi doing a jigsaw puzzle – with all four panels themselves looking like assembled puzzles – is clever and effective. The dialogue in this version of Nancy is updated for contemporary tastes but still kept very simple, although errors do creep in (“smell of a campire” on page 164). The occasional “meta” strip, which actually reflects an element introduced by Bushmiller (1905-1982), is fun, as in one where Fritzi examines the rings of a tree trunk “from when the artist was bad at drawing circles” and “from when she got better at circles.” And there are other reflections of the original Nancy, most of them mild and at least some likely unintentional: Nancy cleverly cutting a diagonal slice from a cake before reassembling it, promising to spend more time chewing a bite of her food and then piling a huge amount on her fork for the next bite, making cupcake mix in a colander so it will flow through the holes directly into the baking pan, setting up corners of the house with lots of creature comforts when she knows she is about to be made to sit in a corner, and so on. These strips are the best elements of the “Jaimes” version of Nancy. In contrast, strips that try to ring changes on the original Nancy characters tend to fall flat, such as one in which Sluggo, asked about all the patches on his jacket, says nothing about being desperately poor (which would be a no-no today), but comments, “I don’t question the holes. They just appear on their own.” The underlying harmless mischief of the original Nancy seems almost quaint in some of its reflections in the “Jaimes” version, as in a strip where Nancy, told not to move the sprinkler so it will reach her in the shade, sets up a trampoline so the spray hits it and then bounces off onto her shady spot. “Jaimes” is not the first artist to have taken up Nancy after Bushmiller’s death, but she is the first to try to remake the strip to fit an entirely new audience and new, electronically focused world. The result is fine, really, if scarcely very distinctive and not particularly tuned into the history of the characters – but who needs history in the Internet age, anyway?

     The Internet-based homogenization of comic strips is such that the art in one tends to look remarkably like the art in the next one. Christina Stewart’s oh-so-with-it version of Heart of the City has an appearance very much like that of Nancy by “Jaimes,” although Stewart is more capable when portraying footwear. Originally, Heart of the City (the city being Philadelphia) was a family-and-friends-focused strip in which elementary-school-age Heart lived in her own world through her obsessions with Hollywood and celebrity culture. Stewart turns the strip into a middle-school one – making Heart 11 years old – and includes the typical fashionable gender, ethnic, racial and social/family mixes for Heart’s friend group. Heart is not much of a protagonist, not being interesting enough to be the center of the strip except in name: the comings and goings of her friends are more important than those of Heart herself. In the second Stewart-created Heart of the City collection, there is an awkwardly managed attempt to establish a relationship between Heart and her father, Antonio: of course, her parents are divorced. At one point, Antonio visits and brings Heart tickets she wants to a Broadway show – because Heart’s mom, Addy, has gotten him to bring them. At another point, Heart, who has been given the understudy role in a school play and resents not getting the lead, turns to Antonio for advice. Neither of these sequences is particularly affecting (much less, umm, “Heartwarming”). The strip is far more focused on various friends created by Stewart than on any carryovers from the earlier version of the strip, although some characters from the earlier strip have been retained and given a different orientation. Among the middle-schoolers here is student-theater technician Charlotte, who has two mothers. Also here is Kat, nominally Heart’s best friend, who is attracted to other girls and has an ongoing flirtation with a newly introduced girl named Lee in Lost and Found. And so on. Heart’s best male friend, Dean, is less important in the Stewart strip, but is used in the new collection to bring about some specific sequences, such as one in which his cousin Sean shows up and turns out to be an unreconstructed “macho” type (“In my school, you get beat up for being girly”). Stewart likes to show the characters on the verge of adolescence – one series is about Heart, Kat and Charlotte all growing armpit hair. And she likes to create mini-stories that seem to have some promise – a detective sequence, a “Friendship Matchmakers” idea – but has little patience for carrying the ideas through, with the result that they peter out before fully establishing themselves. In the Internet era, none of this really seems to matter, since attention spans can be minuscule online and there is always something new to see or do or try out: continuity is an unneeded luxury (not a luxury at all, in fact). So Stewart, like “Jaimes,” is producing a comic with blocky-style characters, minimal backgrounds, little continuity, and characters differentiated not by personality but by surface-level differences such as skin color. All this is in line with the rapidly changing nature of comic strips themselves, and it is likely that in the not-too-distant future, the earlier versions of strips such as Nancy and Heart of the City will be relegated to the same old-fashioned museums where the fossil remnants of the newspapers for which they were created will also be found.