Nancy / YMMV - TV Tropes

Alternative Joke Interpretation: The March 18, 1950 strip confused many readers when it popped up on Twitter. Nancy walks into a Double Feature intended for adults, then comes back wearing incredibly big shoes. Someone speculated this was a Visual Pun on the phrase "getting too big for your boots", since Nancy conceitedly walks into a theater assuming she'll understand the movie. Another is that people took off their shoes in the theater and Nancy got hers confused on the way out. It could also be that since people usually take off their hats before going to a movie, Nancy took off her shoes, since she doesn't wear a hat. And yet another believes it's a pun on double feet-ure.
Audience-Alienating Era: Some fans feel that Guy and Brad Gilchrist (later Guy Gilchrist after Brad left) ruined the strip with glurgy changes to the comic (explicitly making Nancy and Sluggo orphans, various strips relating to Christianity, and the final arc of Gilchrist's run, the marriage saga, where Fritzi and Phil marry, not to mention a particularly glurgy strip where Sluggo gives away his ring) and softening the tone of the strip. This changed in 2018 where Olivia Jaimes took over as artist for the strip, and brought in modern gags and retaining Bushmiller's fourth-wall breaks.
Growing the Beard: Many younger readers feel the comic improved drastically when Olivia Jaimes took over, due to her adding more modern jokes and settings while also returning to Bushmiller's aesthetic roots. A lot of older readers disagree, however.
Memetic Mutation: Sluggo is lit.^note
Older Than They Think: Olivia Jaimes wasn't the first cartoonist to modernize Nancy, that honor belonging to Jerry Scott in the mid-1980s (although his was more gradual, as his early strips followed the Bushmiller style more closely).
Tough Act to Follow: The 28 April 2018 strip seems to be Jaimes acknowledging the daunting reputation of Bushmiller's run.
Values Dissonance: Fritzi's frequent use of Corporal Punishment on Nancy during the Bushmiller years would probably raise a lot of eyebrows today.
Values Resonance: In this strip, Nancy goes to see a movie in theatres and enjoys it, but after reading a bad review about it in the newspaper, she starts to cry and exclaims, "You know that movie we enjoyed so much? I just found out it's terrible." This is only more relevant in the 21st century with the rise of movie-review sites like IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes that have the power to make or break a movie's reputation. Even without looking at those sites, in the digital age it's all but impossible to avoid hearing people's opinions online about every major movie release, which can influence your perception of a movie before you've even made up your mind to go see the darn thing.
Vindicated by History: The strip's reputation gradually improved in the late '10s, due to a variety of factors:
- How to Read Nancy thoroughly analysed and broke down the strip's structure panel-by-panel, showing just how well Bushmiller understood both the comic strip format and how to structure a joke.
- Reprint volumes were released. Fantagraphics released a series covering the earliest years of Ernie Bushmiller's run, and Drawn and Quarterly reprinted John Stanley's run of the Dell comic books.
- The Tumblr blog "Nancy Is Happy" posted a large amount of panels out of context, and became highly popular as a result. (Notably, Olivia Jaimes cited the blog as the reason that she got into Nancy in the first place.)
- Olivia Jaimes began her critically-acclaimed reboot, gathering the strip attention and causing people to go back and appreciate the originals.
- A few Twitter accounts posting both Bushmiller's original strips and Olivia Jaimes' reboot caused the strip to be shared widely, further stretching the online audience.

YMMV / Nancy

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