Beginnings: Comic Strips, Part 5 Little Nemo in Sumberland

Little Nemo in Slumberland

Little Nemo was another adventure strip, it time a fantasy adventure taking place in Nemo’s dreams. The character was created by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. He originated in an early comic strip by McCay, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, before receiving his own spin-off series, Little Nemo in Slumberland. The full-page weekly strip depicted Nemo having fantastic dreams that were interrupted by his awakening in the final panel. The strip is considered McCay’s masterpiece for its experiments with the form of the comics page, its use of color and perspective, its timing and pacing, the size and shape of its panels, and its architectural and other details.

The comic strip ran in the New York Herald from October 15, 1905, until July 23, 1911. The strip was renamed In the Land of Wonderful Dreams when McCay brought it to William Randolph Hearst’s New York American, where it ran from September 3, 1911, until July 26, 1914. When McCay returned to the Herald in 1924, he revived the strip, and it ran under its original title from August 3, 1924, until January 9, 1927.

The weekly fantasy adventure featured the young Nemo (“No one” in Latin) who dreamed himself into wondrous predicaments from which he awoke in bed in the last panel. The first episode began with a command from King Morpheus of Slumberland to a minion to collect Nemo. Nemo was to be the playmate of Slumberland’s Princess, but it took months of adventures before Nemo finally arrived; a green, cigar-chewing clown named Flip was determined to disturb Nemo’s sleep with a top hat emblazoned with the words “Wake Up.” Nemo and Flip eventually became companions, and were joined by an African Imp whom Flip found in the Candy Islands. The group traveled far and wide, from shanty towns to Mars, to Jack Frost’s palace, to the bizarre architecture and distorted funhouse-mirror illusions of Befuddle Hall.

The strip showed McCay’s understanding of dream psychology, particularly of dream fears—falling, drowning, impalement. This dream world had its own moral code, perhaps difficult to understand. Breaking it had terrible consequences, as when Nemo ignored instructions not to touch Queen Crystalette, who inhabited a cave of glass. Overcome with his infatuation, he caused her and her followers to shatter, and awoke with “the groans of the dying guardsmen still ringing in his ears”.

McCay experimented with the form of the comics page, its timing and pacing, the size and shape of its panels, perspective, and architectural and other detail. From the second installment, McCay had the panel sizes and layouts conform to the action in the strip: as a forest of mushrooms grew, so did the panels, and the panels shrank as the mushrooms collapsed on Nemo. In an early Thanksgiving episode, the focal action of a giant turkey gobbling Nemo’s house received an enormous circular panel in the center of the page. McCay also accommodated a sense of proportion with panel size and shape, showing elephants and dragons at a scale the reader could feel in proportion to the regular characters. McCay controlled narrative pacing through variation or repetition, as with equally-sized panels whose repeated layouts and minute differences in movement conveyed a feeling of buildup to some climactic action.

In his familiar Art Nouveau-influenced style, McCay outlined his characters in heavy blacks. Slumberland’s ornate architecture was reminiscent of the architecture designed by McKim, Mead & White for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, as well as Luna Park and Dreamland in Coney Island, and the Parisian Luxembourg Palace.

McCay made imaginative use of color, sometimes changing the backgrounds’ or characters’ colors from panel to panel in a psychedelic imitation of a dream experience. The colors were enhanced by the careful attention and advanced Ben Day lithographic process employed by the Herald’s printing staff. McCay annotated the Nemo pages for the printers with the precise color schemes he wanted.

For the first five months the pages were accompanied with captions beneath them, and at first the captions were numbered. In contrast to the high level of skill in the artwork, the dialogue in the speech balloons was crude, sometimes approaching illegibility, and “disfigur[ing McCay’s] otherwise flawless work”, according to critic R. C. Harvey. The level of effort and skill apparent in the title lettering highlights what seems to be the little regard for the dialogue balloons, their content, and their placement in the visual composition. They tend to contain repetitive monologues expressing the increasing distress of the speakers, and showed that McCay’s gift was in the visual and not the verbal.