Little Nemo: 1905-1914 (Evergreen) by Winsor McCay
|
Our Price: $38.50 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Little Nemo: 1905-1914 (Evergreen)
Book Review: Nice Reproductions of McCay's Seminal Strip
Summary: 5 Stars
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.)
Book Review: Winsor McCay, an artist for all times
Summary: 5 Stars
Paging through this book is a completely humbling experience. Today, anyone with even a modicum of Photoshop chops can wow the folks back home with glitzy effects or totally synthesized environments and interfaces. (--Not that that is entirely a bad thing.) But long before computers, Winsor McCay was making vivid, fevered, fully realized jaw-dropping dreams with india ink, brush and a scratch pen. (Leave it to the psychedelic 60s to rediscover this trippy gem of the comics.) And it isn't just the narrative content, as singular as that is, that begs our attention: Even in an age of artists like J. C. Coll, Franklin Booth, Willy Pogany, Charles Dana Gibson, Rose O'Neill and other masters of illustration, Winsor McCay was a titanic genius. The obsessive level of McCay's detail cries out for a larger sized reproduction of these great Sunday Pages. But for the price, this collection is unbeatable.
Book Review: Better than it promised to be!
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is the quintessential collection of Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo" Sunday strips. Every single page is lovingly reproduced herein, guaranteed to delight the devotee and novice alike. I cannot and will not try to expound on the oft-repeated acknowledgment of McCay's brilliance. The focus here is the completeness of this compilation. It's all here, in one handy volume for all to see and be dazzled by. The only thing that could have been better would be full-sized reproductions (hint, hint). My thanks to the editors and everyone else who brought it into reality!Book Review: La mejor edicion posible
Summary: 5 Stars
No entiendo por que le han dado solo 4 estrellas. Dejando de lado la calidad de la obra, esta edicion completa, de tapa dura y a tan bajo precio no creo que pueda ser superada. Tal vez alguien prefiera esas largas introducciones o estudios sobre la obra, pero es algo que abunda en infinidad de libros. Ojala la editorial siga eidtando otros libros de este estilo.Book Review: Outstanding collection
Summary: 5 Stars
If you are looking for a great, affordable complete set of the Little Nemo comics, this is it! Taschen always does a great job and this book is no exception. The quality of the images are excellent and the reproductions, though not the same size as the originals, are large enough to easily read.