The Internet Nancy phenomenon includes various confessions, tributes, remixes, rants, solidarity, art, parody, a game, anger, a video, and so on. From the “it’s so bad, it’s good” approach to the “its generic quality makes it intriguing” approach, Nancy has become more pronounced on the Web due to nostalgia, affection, critique, and, of course, circulation.

Links to Nancy fascinate me. As do the “things” linked to. And this work fascinates me probably for the same reasons people go to so much trouble to create these links in the first place. The Web makes the mundane and banal weird and interesting. BoingBoing, Waxy, and Metafilter are popular sites for promoting that point. Why do we collect what we do? Why do we like what we do? Why are we attracted to the odd? Even a cover of a Nancy and Sluggo comic book encourages new kinds of questions because of the context we are seeing it in (the circulation of fascination as opposed to its initial production - a kid buying it off the rack however many years ago…): Why are they getting high on soap? What kind of sexual image is this anyway? Sluggo looks like he’s had enough. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

These questions - silly or serious - are the concerns of circulation. And they are the concerns of Nancy itself.

The circulation might be internal (the ways the covers speak to each other):

Or it might be internal in the strip itself (the “it” not just the girl but the ways the same dead jokes and routines interact with each other).

Or in circulation elsewhere:

The circulations are gathered and stored, turned into concerns, transformed from being “junk” (i.e. unfunny) into something else. Nancy on the Web is transformative; it speaks to the ways commonplaces might change elsewhere (institutions, attitudes, practices, beliefs) when put into circulation.

Gosh. Look at how the worthless becomes valuable when usage is discovered.