Little Nemo 1905-1914 (Evergreen) [ハードカバー]

This Taschen book adequately reprints the first run of Winsor McCay's seminal comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland. Little Nemo is a 9-year old who drifts off to sleep each night only to be transported to Slumberland, a hallucinogenic world of circus performers, royal court attendants, exotic personages of all stripe, and animals both tame and wild. I loved looking at these strips as a child, but I didn't understand them until much later.

McCay worked on an epic scale. Each strip ran to dozens of dialog baloons and hundreds of clearly rendered people and things, and often involved a half dozen characters or more. The most notable denizen of Slumberland other than Nemo is Flip, Nemo's arch-nemesis, who is set on nothing more than casting Nemo out of Slumberland by tricking him into waking up. The stories are scary in the amorphous manner of dreams -- characters grow large and walk over cities, or so small they are dwarfed by raspberries, inducing a dreamlike sence of vertigo and plasticity. Another recurring dream-like theme is flight, effected by baloons, stars, giant dragonflies or even Nemo's own out-of-control bed.

The strips, originally filling a 15x23 inch newspaper page, are perhaps the most intricate and well rendered comics ever to be produced. At just over 12 inches tall, these reproductions are disappointingly small. And although the text is clear, it is tiny. Each panel is exquisitely composed and could stand on its own as a compelling work of graphic art, drawn with a beautiful art nouveau line and a rainbow pastel palette that makes one wonder what they knew about printing comics in 1905 that's been since forgotten. Although numbered for readers at the time, McKay's control of flow leaves no doubt as to the order of panels in the mind of the modern comic entusiast; he would routinely stretch time and space, and think nothing of propelling action from one panel to the next -- tricks in the bag of every modern comic artist. (As an aside, Scott McCloud's book "Understanding Comics" is a most excellent treatise on comic book art in general and page flow in particular.)

After balking at the beautiful but costly and somewhat unwieldy format of the complete Little Nemo series from Fantagraphics Books (and watching the first few volumes go out of print), I decided to give the much less costly Tashcen complete edition a try. I was fully prepared to send it back, but instead I was quite pleasantly surprised!

The strips are presented on a higher-quality white gloss paper. Colors, for the most part, are bright and clear. It's true some strips look a bit faded but I have no idea if it is just due to natural aging or production cost-cutting. However, these are thankfully relatively few in number, and even the worst of them is far from unreadable. The binding seems a tad fragile. Bill Blackbeard's introduction, although insightful, is very brief and provides little info on Windsor McKay.

Still, to have all of the Little Nemo strips in an more economical and user-friendly format is a revelation. With few exceptions, McKay's imagination is consistently fresh and inventive. He also includes some unfortunate portrayals of racial sterotypes -- but given the period in which these strips originally appeared, this was hardly unique to Windsor McKay.

Still, to be able to hold all of McKay's Little Nemo strips in your lap and browse through them at your leisure makes you realize he does deserve the reputation of being a master of the graphic story form. Like all of the great comic strip artists, he really does take you into another world. Breathtakingly rendered, these strips represent a level of execution that we may never see in the "Sunday Funnies" again.

Buy it before it goes out of print!

Little Nemo in Slumberland was introduced to America over a century ago, and these pages still have the power to astonish and touch anyone that reads them. The utter timelessness of this strip, both in artwork and vision, is the kind of testament to genius that very few graphic artists ever receive. Winsor McCay was such a genius and his major work, Little Nemo in Slumberland, is a vastly rich exploration of human dreams.

What is it about Little Nemo that was so special? First and foremost, we have the pure draftsmanship of Winsor McCay. The man could (and with his imagination, often did) draw anything. Where a great deal of comic art from the time was somewhat static and stiff, McCay's figures had fluidity. His characters seemed to be caught in motion, captured in very difficult angles and postures to draw. McCay handled it all with incredible ease. When McCay drew Little Nemo climbing over a wall, it captured perfectly the struggle of a nine-year-old boy, fighting both his own small size and his pajamas. The man had a sense of perspective and composition that was nearly superhuman. He could portray an entire make-believe city, with shimmering towers and distant castles, in a single panel and give it a quality of detail and depth that barely seems possible.

Secondly, of course, was the breadth of McCay's imagination. Sometimes little Nemo dreamt beautiful fantasies, sometimes disturbing nightmares (Nemo's journey toward Slumberland at times resembled Dante's journey through the nine circles). Suffice to say that the details of these dreams are simply mind expanding. One can only imagine the impression they made on a 1905 comic strip reader.

Lastly, and for me most importantly, was the character of Nemo. McCay's portrayal of a six year old boy was completely spot on and timeless. Anyone that has ever had a boy child will instantly see their own son in Nemo, and this superb characterization was done more visually than with text or dialogue (if this doesn't make sense, have a look at the strip to see what I mean. Nemo's very posture suggests all the heartbreaking vulnerability and innocence of a young child). There is a subtle and complete sweetness that underlies the entire work that makes it emotionally memorable and captivating. The staggering beauty of McCay's panels often overshadows the fact that Nemo was nearly always the terrorized victim of his dreams. Yet no matter how hostile and threatening his dream world became, he never responded with anything but trust and hope (amazingly, this quality never seemed sentimental but always rang true - such was the power of McCay's art). It is the kind of work that has a place in both your heart and your mind.

This is a very affordable and worthwhile edition of McCay's historic series. The colors are well reproduced, the paper stock is excellent, and the binding is superb. Lovers of the graphic arts should be very grateful to Evergreen for producing this well-done and reasonably priced book. I highly recommend it. ---Mykal Banta