comma, Did we come in?
I thought perhaps the local paper had messed this up but no, it’s the same online. Either there’s a first panel missing or the dialog is just borked.
Mitch suggests, “except that the Nancy artist likes playing meta games and so forth and could be intentionally starting off in medias res…”
What does the braintrust think?
Comics I Don't Understand 
This would actually be an easier strip to understand if it were not from an artist who likes playing meta games and so forth. It’s actually pretty straightforward: Fritzi is surprised that Nancy has carved the pumpkins asymmetrically. In response to Nancy’s crestfallen look, though, she quickly withdraws this criticism and endorses Nancy’s plan to make a few more small changes. But Nancy actually had a plan: to direct trick-or-treaters elsewhere, so she could retain all the Halloween candy. It’s a clever conceit, more characteristic of Bushmiller than Jaimes.
Usual John has it, I think, as does Mitch.
And yes we came into this in the middle of a sentence. Too dialog heavy to fit in the beginning of that sentence so we have to infer the start.
Although a missing or discarded panel is a possible solution, I think that if the first dialog balloon shown here was supposed to be “starting in the middle”, then the artist would have begun the text with an ellipsis (“…”).
I think the problem is a simple typo. If you ignore the spurious “or” at the beginning of the sentence, the whole strip reads perfectly fine.
I’m wondering, as an infrequent reader of Nancy, why she put her defensive Jsck o’Lanterns out on October 22. They must have been the worse for wear by Hallowe’en.
@ ootenaboot – Jaimes had two separate Sunday strips demonstrating Nancy’s unstoppable greed for Halloween candy. The second strip would have fit perfectly well on Nov. 5th,† but she decided to run it on Oct. 29th, forcing the first strip to run on the 22nd:
P.S. (†) – I wonder whether this means that we will see a third helping of Nancy’s candy next Sunday…
I think it might be deliberate to show that Mitzi didn’t really mean to say it aloud. I’ve seen that type of construction used in comic books where a character is transitioning from an internal narrative to speaking.
Also I really admire how well the strip shows subtle facial expressions. Mitzi really looks contrite.
A small correction, Andrew. It’s Aunt Fritzi. (Surname Ritz.)
But I meant to say, I agree about how her thoughts are nicely captured in her appearance, thanks to the artist.
a) What is that green thing Nancy is holding in the 2nd panel?
b) There are 3 pumpkins inside at the carving table but only 2 made it to jack-o-lanterndom to be placed outside.
@ S.M.B. (10) – (a) The green thingy is one of those little plastic scrapers included in children’s carving toolkits. They are usually orange, but the colorist may not have known that.
(b) Perhaps the third pumpkin was made into a pie? Carving pumpkins usually aren’t that good for cooking, but it can be done.
Generally, Sunday strips are colored by the cartoonist.
As a creative person myself, I found the criticism of Nancy’s handiwork to be rather odd, as if there’s a right way to do it. She should be encouraged to carve her jack-o-lantern any way she pleases. 🙂 I did find the punchline panel funny, though.
@ Brian (12) – Maybe she chose pastel green because orange would have made it look like part of Nancy’s hand.
P.S. Perhaps we should be wondering how Nancy managed to scoop out all the pumpkin guts without leaving even a trace of a cut line for the lids, or how Fritzi manages to stay on the left side of the pumpkins even when the point of view is rotated by 180 degrees between the first and second panels…
You can go from the bottom.
@ Brian (15) – I’ve never seen one done that way, but it’s an interesting idea. I’ll have to make a note to try it next year.
A helpful commenter on GoComics posted a link to this:
which provides the missing dialog in the drop panel, which for some reason is never provided with the online version.
Thanks very much, Urban! That indeed clears up an initial part of the mystery!
Ditto @ Urban (17) – It appears that with only very few exceptions, most papers print the “truncated” strip. One would think that Olivia Jaimes would be aware of this and design the throwaway panel so it doesn’t leave oddities like this for most of her readership to digest.
I saw the “bottom carve” method in a YouTube video. She also had her chickens carve the Jack-o-lantern features, which worked surprisingly well.
I’ve never understood why an online service would lop off the top of a comic. It’s not like it saves paper or ink.
@ Boise Ed (21) – GoComics doesn’t do any cutting, editing, nor vetting on their own, they are totally dependent on whatever is sent to them by the syndicates. It’s Nancy’s syndicate editor who is at fault here, and secondarily all the cheapskate papers that are forced to shrink everything down to the minimum possible size.
@22 Kilby: GoComics is a division of Andrews McMeel Universal, and Nancy is syndicated by Andrews McMeel Syndicate. They should be able to coordinate with each other.
In this case, Olivia Jaimes could have just moved the word “or” from the second panel to the drop panel and avoided any confusion.
Drop panel: Fritzi: “Nancy, is it just me, or …”
Panel 2: Fritzi: “Are the eyes on the pumpkins you carved a little crooked?”
@ Joshua K (23) – The point is that they do not coordinate anything; the syndicates do only the least possible amount of work to provide a barely acceptable feed for online purposes, and GoComics has neither the time nor the resources to make even the most minimal corrections or improvements.
P.S. @24 – I agree. See my comment @4.
Kilby (22): That’s even dumber, for the folks who are selling the strip to cut off part of it.
I have had discussions with the GC staff in the past. They say Kilby relates, that they take what the syndicates sends. If they don’t get anything for a day, nothing runs. There’s been talk about B.C. because a number of recent strips have been in B&W while appearing in color elsewhere. People assume GC is removing the color (I don’t know if that’s even possible) or not paying their colorists (they don’t color strips).
@ Boise Ed (26) – It’s not a matter of intelligence (or lack thereof), it’s simply logistics to fit modern conditions. The standardized Sunday panel divisions were first developed for another era, when each newspaper was responsible for its own layout, and even pasting it together manually. The syndicate could simply deliver the same (full size) strip to every paper, and let each one slice and dice it to fit the available space. Since then, there have been several major innovations in printing technology, and papers don’t rearrange Sunday strips: they need a ready-made (digital) image in the correct format and size.
If almost all papers use the smaller, truncated version of Nancy, it is understandable that the syndicate would make that version their “standard” delivery format, rather than the full size original. The stupidity is the syndicate insisting on the full-size title rectangle, rather than having the flexibility to include the throwaway panel when it is significant, and to a lesser extent, the author not being aware of the situation and failing to adjust the wording for compatibility (see Joshua @24).
A recent article in The Daily Cartoonist touched upon this subject (see the Blondie strip near the end).
I still get the Sunday paper. As mentioned in the past, Lee Enterprises mandated a common comics lineup to all of their owned papers. None of them have extra panels at all. Two pages have four strips, two have five. In the latter, some of the strips are stretched horizontally to fit. It looks pretty bad.
Nancy might like our house, at least in our earlier years as she could have had a large amount of the candy we bought.
Have lived here for 30 plus years – no trick or treaters in all these years. At first I figured it was because there were no children near us and none of the families in the general area knew us so we would be the “don’t go to anyone we don’t know” people. But for some years now we have a girl in the house south of us and 2 girls in the house north of us who know us at least to wave to, have their mom ask me to write a reference for her for a job… – and still no one has come.
Before this when we were first married we lived in an apartment in a “garden apartment” complex and in the 10 years we lived there we had two girls, who came together, come trick or treating _ I figured that lack was due to the fact that all apartments were 1 bedroom and very few if any children must have lived there (never saw any) and to anyone not living there we were, again, strangers.
I know that trick or treating IS traditional in the community as husband grew up in it and I have to hear his stories of trick or treating every year and how they would eat the unwrapped candy before they went home. (My sisters and I and – as far as I know, my friends – all waited to get home and have mom approve the candies – most of which for me would end in my bedroom closet in the bag I went trick or treating in and would be thrown out in August- and believe me, I was a candy EATER – but only if it was a candy I liked.)