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Nancy Wins at Friendship is the second collection of the Olivia Jaimes era of that long-running newspaper strip; it was published in 2023 but seems to mostly reprint strips from the 2019-2020 era. Jaimes took over the strip in 2018, and her first collection, just called Nancy , came out less than a year later – in some world where newspaper comic strip collections are things “the kids” buy and read and crave, there could have been eight or ten books this length by now.

But the whole point of the early Olivia Jaimes Nancy is that “kids these days” are different. So that’s not just a counterfactual, but one that directly contradicts the work itself.

I wrote about the first book about six months ago: those strips were a shock, in a good way, back in 2018. The Guy Gilchrist version of Nancy had been slowly losing newspapers for years as it sunk...

It’s not often that a syndicate gets praise for how they handle the transition on a legacy comic. This is the biggest example I can think of, and one of the biggest transitions in decades. By comparison, the new Flash Gordon artist this year is more typical: breathing new life into a beloved old feature by doing basically the same thing, just with more zip and energy.

Olivia Jaimes wasn’t doing the same thing with Nancy in 2018. What was once a finely tuned engine of precisely drawn gags by Ernie Bushmiller had devolved into a bland collection of glurge, drawn by Guy Gilchrist as the demented spawn of Precious Moments and Art Frahm. But Nancy had been through transitions before: it’s easy to forget that Bushmiller himself took over a strip then called Fritzi Ritz in 1925, added Nancy as a character, and shifted the whole strip based...

The late, great Jim Henson's impact on television cannot be understated. Obviously, "Sesame Street" was a trailblazer for children's programming. Using Henson's googly-eyed puppets, the PBS series educated kids about everything from math to the different cultures of the world and the circle of life itself. Henson's "Fraggle Rock" was no less ambitious; beneath the boisterous songs and the rowdy Fraggles' shenanigans was a radical peacenik series Henson hoped would "change the world and stop war."

"Muppet Babies," an animated show featuring Henson's Muppets as pint-sized toddlers in a nursery, set its sights nearly as high. At first, Henson was hesitant to collaborate on the series with Marvel Productions, worrying the studio's children's cartoons based on known properties in the 1970s and early '80s lacked the depth of his previous TV ventures. In time, though, it was the very challenge of producing a cartoon that held to...

The Muppet Babies say they’ll make our dreams come true but do they mean it? How long has it been that you’ve seen an episode of Muppet Babies? For some of us maybe since it went off the air in 1991 while the rest of us probably most recently caught it during its reruns not long after. And unless we’re talking bootlegs or VHS rips, that will probably be the last time we see the animated show. So what gives? Where are the diaper-clad versions of Kermit, Piggy, Fozzie, and the rest of the gang?

According to Guy Gilchrist, who worked under Jim Henson (albeit not on Muppet Babies), the reason we will never have the show has to do with rights. If you remember, the show would frequently incorporate clips of classic movies, TV shows and more as part of the Muppets’ fantasies, putting them in the...

Muppet Babies, a popular addition to The Muppets franchise, is not available for streaming on Disney+ due to copyright and trademark issues. The innovative format of Muppet Babies, which blended live-action movie clips with animated stories, is what prevents the series from being aired again. The lack of camaraderie among studios in the industry today makes it difficult for Muppet Babies to find a streaming platform home due to copyright royalties and trademark concerns.

One of the biggest questions asked about The Muppets franchise is why the ‘80s animated series Muppet Babies is not streaming on Disney+ along with hours of other puppet content, which does include the 2018 reboot of the series. As a hugely popular addition to the franchise, airing originally between 1984 and 1991, Muppet Babies blended clips from a variety of live-action movies and TV shows with animated stories of infant versions of Kermit, Piggy, Gonzo, Animal, and the rest of The Muppets.

Muppet Babies is one of the rare 1980s animated shows that are not available to stream, and Jim Henson cartoonist Guy Gilchrist is revealing why.

During a recent appearance at L.A. Comic Con, Gilchrist gave some answers as to why the Muppet Babies was not available to stream on any of the digital platforms.

Gilchrist said it comes down to “copyrights and trademarks” as the reason why the show has not been able to get into a streaming service. The cartoonist said in an interview with Dennis Does LA that back in the 80s, there was “camaraderie” between the studios, something that doesn’t exist today amid the big corporate takeovers.

“Besides using the stuff that was in the public domain, like the silent stuff that we used in the dream sequences… Remember, the editing on that was incredibly wonderful. We used a lot of film clips from a lot of different things,...