Little Nemo: 1905-1914

Little Nemo: 1905-1914 by Winsor McCay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Little Nemo: 1905-1914 contains every Little Nemo newspaper strip from its prime era.

I first encountered Little Nemo in a NES game about a thousand years ago. Since then, everyone from Bill Watterson to Moebius cites him as an influence. I found this on the cheap and decided to dive in.

First off, this book is awkward as hell to read. It's coffee table sized and the print isn't very easy to read. While not exactly small, the font is really understated. Skinny, maybe? Whatever the opposite of bold is. It strained my eyes enough to give me a headache until I learned to limit myself to ten pages at a time. Also, it took me a few minutes to get used to the captions being underneath the panels rather than above. Eventually, McCay dispensed with the captions all together, making for a smoother read.

Once I got used to reading it, I started digging Little Nemo right away. Some bizarre stuff happens right off the bat and I'm having a hard time imaging a Sunday paper featuring Little Nemo in the comics section, what with mushroom forests, ostriches with twenty-foot legs, and creepy ass clowns all over the place.

The stories are one-shots at first but gradually evolve into a linked series with Nemo finally entering Slumberland and meeting the Princess. His arch-nemesis, a kid who is a stogie-smoking clown named Flip, starts ruining Nemo's good time at every turn. They eventually become friends but Flip is still an asshole. Since this was a Sunday strip, some of the stories go on for months and months.

The art is the star of the show here, which is a good thing because old Winsor wrote some wooden-ass dialogue. The lettering looks like Winsor drew the word balloons first and then contorted the dialogue to fit into them. Not only that, every page ends with Nemo waking up. Anyway, Winsor's art style is rooted in illustration and political cartoons, making it way more detailed than I originally thought. There are so many fine lines and tiny details that I have no problem believing some pages took about a week to do. Also, the man draws a mean hippopotamus.

The comic strip was still in its infancy at this point but Winsor McCay was doing some interesting stuff, like varying panel sizes and drawing extremely intricate backgrounds. His use of perspective was light years ahead of its time. I keep forgetting this strip appeared in the newspaper. Imagine a time when a single comic could take up the entire page.




Artistically, I'd say the run through Befuddle Hall, a bizarre series of upside, sideways, and perspective warping rooms was the highlight of the first few years. From there, Nemo experiences a series of stories that start in his bed instead of Slumberland, Winsor mixing up the formula.



You can definitely tell how Winsor McCay's artwork influenced people like Moebius with his clean lines and hyper-detailed backgrounds. You can also see how the subject matter inspired Bill Watterson in Calvin's daydreams, although Calvin never went through the things Nemo went through, like airship rides, polar wastelands and surrealist architecture. Some of the edifices Nemo explores would be right at home in a Steve Ditko Doctor Strange tale.

While the writing leaves something to be desired, Little Nemo is a fascinating look at comics in their embryonic form. The art holds up surprisingly well and the subject matter is timeless. I'll be cracking open this behemoth periodically for years to come. 4 out of 5 stars.

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