Best of 2023: The Unforgivable Sappiness of of Former Nancy Cartoonist Guy Gilchrist
It’s funny sometimes the things that stick with you. For reasons that I cannot begin to fathom, when I was a small child obsessed with comic strips, to the point where I wanted to be a cartoonist despite a complete lack of drawing ability, my dad told me that he hated Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy.
He told me that Bushmiller did not actually write or draw Nancy. Instead he farmed the work out to underlings after explicitly telling them not to make the strips too funny or people would realize that he hadn’t made them.
This is the only time my father ever expressed an opinion about comic strips. It made an impression on me. I assumed that my father’s only comic strip opinion must be valid and assumed that Bushmiller was a hack.
Then I got into the weird world of Facebook comic strip groups and gained a whole new appreciation for Bushmiller’s artistry. I joined a group based on the cult book How to Read Nancy and realized that my father had been wrong all along.
At the risk of being hyperbolic, Ernie Bushmiller is the only authentic genius our nation has ever produced. Miles Davis, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway are garbage compared to the man who made Nancy.
Bushmiller is a hero in the Facebook comic strip groups that I belong to. The same is true of Olivia Jaimes, the genius who took over Nancy and elevated it to giddy new heights.
James did not take over for Bushmiller, however. Jaimes took over for Guy Gilchrist, a shameless self-promoter and all-around creep who drew the strip for twenty-two years before retiring in 2018.
If James and Bushmiller are heroes in these curious groups and in the world at large then Gilchrist looms large as one of the biggest villains in the comic strip world.
The genius of Bushmiller and later Jaimes is that Nancy is a force for anarchy in the universe. In her original conception Nancy was defiantly non-cute. She was a little juvenile delinquent, but not as much as her best friend and foil Sluggo, who definitely seems like he’ll end up in jail.
Like Heathcliff, Nancy is punk. Nancy is countercultural. Nancy doesn’t give a fuck about propriety. Nancy is a rebel. She doesn’t want to save the world; she wants to see it burn.
That, unfortunately, was not Gilchrist’s take on the character. Gilchrist recreated Bushmiller’s enduring icon of the funny pages into his own odious image.
Everything that Gilchrist draws is nauseatingly cute in the laziest, most cynical manner possible. It’s all just giant eyes and round heads. If Gilchrist were to feature Adolf Hitler in one of his strips he’d somehow find a way to make him nauseatingly cute.
Gilchrist took a strip that had nothing but contempt for sentimentality and made it the sappiest damn strip in existence. In Gilchrist’s evil hands Nancy is no longer an exceedingly identifiable badass: she's a a cute little girl who loves rainbows and puppy dogs and our country and the brave men and women who keep it free.
Gilchrist removed all of the jokes and humor from Nancy to make way for daily schmaltz with a healthy side order of cheesecake courtesy of the smutty way Gilchrist drew Nancy’s Aunt Fritzi.
The Gilchrist version of Nancy was an unforgivable insult to Bushmiller’s creation. Thank God the torch was passed from literally the worst possible Nancy creator to the best.
We should all be grateful to Olivia James for any number of reasons but I am particularly grateful that she freed us from that monster’s hackwork.
I was moved to write this extremely important, no doubt viral blog by a post in one of my Facebook comic strip groups of a picture of Gilchrist and dead hate-monger Pat Robertson smiling alongside a drawing of Nancy alongside the words “Thank you so much! I feel so blessed to be here! With love and light!” From a visit to The 700 Club.
Gilchrist may have destroyed Nancy for over two decades but he seems to know nothing about the character or what makes her special. Here’s a hint: it’s not because she’s adorable, patriotic, sentimental or loves animals, her country and pop music.
