Little Nemo still stands as a truly singular "graphic novel" work that enriches each one of us, regardless of age, as we dream along, or share with little ones. Perhaps Harriman's Krazy Kat and Sendak's best books reach this level of artistry and personal ingenuity. It's as amazing as Cinemascope was roughly 50 years later, and singular in evocative detail. In a letter to cartoonist Clare Briggs, Winsor McCay, the artist and animator, explained that he could no more stop putting pen to paper than he could cease filling his lungs with air. My thought: Little Nemo in Slumberland was the masterpiece of the pre-modern (modern=20th Century-post WWI) newspaper medium. Winsor McCay Little Nemo in Slumberland Sunday Comic Strip Befuddle Hall Original Art dated 2-23-08 (New York Herald, 1908). "I wish I could sleep without waking up!" he says in one panel.įrom NPR Website, written by ETELKA LEHOCZKY Ultimately, Nemo always ends up safely back in his bedroom. Instead, his mind overflows with exotic exploits, wonderful creatures straight out of the circuses McCay loved, and companions to share it all with. Nemo rarely gets a good night's sleep, but he certainly isn't tormented by Freudian angst. With Little Nemo in Slumberland, his groundbreaking newspaper comic, he presented a dream world that was as sublime as it was reassuring to his Edwardian readers. He didn't bring intellectual theories to the fight, but something more potent: beauty. It was 1905, hot on the heels of Freud's supremely unsettling The Interpretation of Dreams, and the cartoonist was Winsor McCay. Once, a cartoonist went to battle for dreamland.
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