They briskly transform his bed into a horse-drawn carriage to take him to Slumberland, where King Morpheus reigns.
In one episode, half a dozen "star imps" emerge from behind the curtains in his bedroom. He finds his passage thwarted by the most outlandish circumstances. Nemo, always clad in Pierrot night clothes, tries again and again to enter the palace of King Morpheus and keep company with his friend the princess.
He went on inventing other strips, but none ever clicked like "Nemo."Įach installment of "Little Nemo" relates the dream experiences of a young boy, a character McCay appears to have based on his son. It became an overnight sensation and led to McCay single-handedly turning out an animated version.Īfter less than a decade, though, the public lost interest in the strip and McCay, who had begun working for a Hearst newspaper in the meantime, was forced into editorial cartooning. He already had three strips going in the still-novel Sunday color pages when the Herald launched "Little Nemo in Slumberland," exactly 100 years and one week ago today. Not until George Herriman perfected "Krazy Kat," nearly a generation later, did deadline art again reach McCay's level.īack when daily newspapers defined and dominated the American media landscape, the New York Herald found it had a secret weapon in McCay (1867-1934).Ī native Midwesterner, he had drawn unstoppably since childhood. Readers today will find the text and dialogue of "Nemo" quaint, but the strip's pictorial drama and inventiveness still astonish. Well before movies had conquered popular consciousness and decades before they exploited color, McCay knew how to swoop a reader's eye through the rigid architecture of the comic strip and how to milk the powdery palette of printing ink colors available to him. It needs a coffee table all to itself.įor those who don't yet know McCay, the briefest glimpse of the book's contents will make the magic of his work evident. Those who already know Winsor McCay's place in the firmament of comic-strip artists will understand, especially when they learn that the book reproduces more than 100 of McCay's best pages at full broadsheet size. In about an hour's time, during the book's brief availability on, it rocketed from 22,020 to 65 in the Web site's sales rankings.
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