Nancy and Me

I love this one, so that's the first part of this message, just "here's a really good one". The second part is a funny little connection, which is that I posted this! I mean I was the original uploader of this exact strip. Ernie Bushmiller drew it in 1972 but I scanned this from one of my Nancy books and posted it on Tumblr in 2011, and now everyone that sees it online is looking at my scan. I know it's my scan because the top left corner isn't square-- I didn't want to crush the binding of the book when I scanned it in, and I decided at the time that this was good enough for Tumblr.

I think anyone that posts enough for long enough has this happen in some form, that something they did or soemthing they were involved with catches an updraft and takes off. It's not really notable or a big deal, and it's not like I deserve credit or anything-- I only bring it up as a funny little connection. Every now and then this one reappears on my feed and I smile. When I was using Tumblr more often I would see the comments on my dashboard as they were rolling out, and there were a lot of people saying "I reblog this every time it shows up in my feed", which is really cute, like the internet version of a beach ball at a baseball game.

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It wasn't until years later that I saw someone made a photoshop edit of this "loan dept" strip, and then I realized that if there's one edit there's gotta be a ton! I was right, and found a bunch on image search and a real trove of them that were either made for or archived on the Something Awful forum website. So that's the rest of the post, my collection of riffs. I didn't include the ones I don't like, but I did include some that aren't great, because sometimes in an exhaustive jam like this you need to include the lesser ones, if only to get them out of the way. Some of these edits were clearly made in conversation with other ones, some are callbacks to other jokes / joke formats which you may or may not know, some are just a silly little idea. I think the collection displays a great variety of approaches to "the riff". What can I say, I love to see a long list of permutations and varied approaches!

I'll start with the original. And just to reiterate, I didn't make any of these. The original was by Ernie Bushmiller and the rest are by anonymous folk artists. If you see any other good ones out there please send them to me!

:)

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links / misc

• The original (or "original") tumblr post is here: [tumblr]. I originally posted this because there was some other account I kept seeing that posted only single panels of Nancy, and the implication was that certain single panels out of context are better than the entire strip. But I just don't think that's true? And it creates this ironic distance that I find distasteful. The whole strip is funny!

  

• A few people asked me if I still have posters left from my poster sale, and I'm happy to say the answer is yes! Everything in the storefront is still for sale. The storefront is just part of the website now, I send out orders every couple days. Thank you to everyone that's been buying stuff!!! I also have a few stuffed animals left... check it out: [link]

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