Little Nemo: 1905-1914 (Evergreen) by Winsor McCay
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Book Reviews of Little Nemo: 1905-1914 (Evergreen)
Book Review: Nemo for all
Summary: 5 Stars
If you know of Little Nemo, but do not have this collection, go for it. Anyone that appreciates well drawn and written Sunday comics should try LN. Come on gang, become a Nemoite!!Book Review: An intensely imaginative and creative road, though with some bumps along the way
Summary: 4 Stars
Little Nemo has been praised as one of the most original comic strips ever created, and it certainly is. It is surreal, imaginative, and very well-drawn and colored. It doesn't keep up all these qualities through to the end, but there is tremendous gold to be found in this treasure.
Little Nemo is a comic strip about the adventures of a young boy as he encounters a great many surreal situations in his dreams. Each comic starts off with Nemo either in the dreamworld at the start, or in bed, and about to enter it. Each comic contains one final panel of Nemo waking up, often startled by what happened in the dream.
Things start out on a fantastic note. In one early strip, Nemo is taking a walk through a forest made of giant mushrooms. He is told not to touch the mushrooms, because they are very delicate. At one point, he accidentally bumps into one, and it breaks neatly into several giant pieces, which then fall and hit another mushroom, which in turn breaks onto another, and so on, thus starting a chain reaction. Another early comic has Nemo accidentally causing disaster in a world made out of living glass people.
The early strips are more about individual surreal adventures rather than telling a continuing story, and they work quite well. At one point, however, McCay must have decided that he had to create a storyline to tell, and that is where each comic tends to be directly related to the story in question.
That's not a bad thing. The stories at first are generally used as vehicles to get him from one original dream sequence to another. Sometimes these sequences are directly related to the story at hand, but oftentimes they are detours. The comic continues in this style for a long while.
At one point, the character of Flip the clown is introduced, and quickly becomes one of the main characters. Flip is a troublemaker who is not allowed to join the Princess of Slumberland, but he eventually does so anyway after a great many failed tries. He soon joins Nemo as a constant companion, with plots that occasionally result in him being thrown out of or separated from the group, with him later either trying to rejoin, or just causing trouble on his own.
Once Flip gets involved in the comic, the comic begins to slowly revolve more and more around him, but for a long time, the stories continue to be largely Nemo-centric affairs about the strange and unusual experiences he has in Slumberland. One wonderfully creative plot had Nemo and the Princess visit the North Pole, and experience, among other things, a snowmaker, which ends up causing more trouble than it's worth when Nemo climbs up a tower to see it in action. During this plot, Flip constantly tries to catch up with the group, often getting thwarted, and serving as a mild sideshow rather than the main attraction.
Later in the strip, though, McCay begins to have an increasing reliance on story arcs. That becomes a problem, however, when some of these story arcs don't really fit in with the dream-like stories that make the comic so original. For instance, at one point there is a story arc that revolves exclusively around Nemo and a crew on an airship traveling to famous cities around the US and Canada, visiting them, and learning facts about them. There is nothing surreal or dream-like that happens in these stories, and they contribute nothing to the comic. As if realizing this, McCay later had Nemo and his crew land on Mars, where the story becomes wonderfully surreal and creative again.
After continuing that re-energized creative spark, McCay loses it again late in the book. During the last two years of Little Nemo, the comic degenerates into slapstick comedy involving Flip and his efforts to break into Slumberland. The title begins to reflect this. This is where "Little Nemo in Slumberland" is now known as "In the Land of Wonderful Dreams", and each story now has its own title. Each title tends to be about Flip; i.e. "Flip Breaks In", "Something's Up, Must Be Flip", etc., sadly showing that Flip has succeeded in hijacking the comic, derailing it from its original form, the story of Nemo's trips through surreal dreamscapes. Some surreal dreamlike elements continue to present themselves even after this transformation, but the story had gone downhill, and the collection ends on a sour note.
I loved this comic collection and I'm very glad I got a chance to read through 10 years worth of the most original newspaper comic I'd ever seen. Even so, I did notice the comic's bumpy quality, ranging from just plain fantastic to downright bland.
I still recommend you check out this collection. There's a lot going for it, and don't let the later drop in story quality get to you - all great things go through that kind of phase. McCay may not have kept up his creative spark forever, but when he had it going for him, he turned out wonderful, amazing, truly original work, work that was ahead of its time, work that's rare and original even in our time, work that is worth seeing for yourself.
Book Review: Little Nemo: 1905-1914 (Evergreen) is a lot for the money
Summary: 4 Stars
I discovered Winsor McCay only 2-3 months ago when reading the Sunday book review supplement in the San Francisco Chronicle. The column was about several different books and authors, however one of them was about the recently (July 2007) published Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (complete), edited, published, masterminded, etc. by the German Ulrich Merkl. I probably wouldn't have noticed the review but for a graphic showing several of McCay's sketches. It turns out that they were from the front cover of Merkle's book. They are, of course, illustrations from McCay's Dream of the Rarebit Fiend series. I was immediately taken with McCay's obvious genius and I immediately looked up McCay at my local library and checked out a copy of Little Nemo in Slumberland, the "Best of..." book edited by Richard Marschall. I was highly impressed by this and looked online and bought this Taschen/Evergreen version and at the same time the inexpensive but very nice reprint of the 1905 book published by Frederick A. Stokes of early Dream of the Rarebit Fiend strips.
The Taschen/Evergreen (the book reviewed here), it turns out, has renderings of Little Nemo in Slumberland that are evidently taken from the same source as those in the Richard Marschall book I just referred to. The colors and even the occasional imperfections are the same, as well as the size. This volume, however, has many more episodes, over 400, probably. The Marschall has a few that are not in this, but they appear to be mainly late (after 1920) episodes, and are generally not up to the quality of the earlier work.
Looking at the reviews of the Peter Maresca 2005 version of Little Nemo in Slumberland ("So Many Splendid Sundays"), I was highly impressed and I discovered that my library had a copy, and of course I checked it out. The full size presentation and superior production was so astonishing that I decided to buy a copy of my own, and it arrived yesterday. I'm still glad I have the Taschen/Evergreen because it has more than three times as many episodes as the Maresca (which has about 110 episodes) and it's nice to have that for continuity (there are often serial runs of episodes). This book is adequate to get the stories and conveys a lot of the majesty and McCay's genius, but having seen the Maresca it's hard to be satisfied with the 2:1 reduction and the inferior colors. They are certainly OK, but the Maresca is breathtaking.
Book Review: Comparison with the Checker volume two
Summary: 4 Stars
I've had the pleasure of owning the Fantagraphics Books six volume set (since lost to a house fire), the Evergreen/Taschen "complete" volume and now the Checker volume two since learning that it contains the Nemo strips from the 1920s.
I believe I am correct when I say that the Evergreen/Taschen single volume contains the same content as the early six volume set. These are missing the 1920's strips. However, contrary to Checker's claims (and they could have easily 'checked'), the Checker volume two is missing several strips.
By Evergreen page number and newspaper publication date they are:
pg.259 7-31-10
pg.350 6-23-12
pg.351 6-30-12
pg.352 7-07-12
pg.353 7-14-12
pg.407 8-31-13
In addition, if the original publication dates noted by Evergreen are correct, two sets of reversed order pages in the Checker volume these are pgs.164 and 165, and 284 and 285. The Evergreen volume has these swapped correctly with dates.
Despite the absence of these six pages, the Checker book is very nice and contains no less than 127 (!) extra pages never before reprinted from the 1920s and that is reason enough to buy this volume at the excellent value it is. The content of these 127 pages is top notch - excellent and imaginative art.
Unfortunately, I do not own the Checker volume one so I can not speak to it's completeness or even the possibility that it contains a page or two extra.
The printing quality is only marginally less than the Evergreen volume - certain black outlines of borders and such are slightly blurred. This difference is fractional and will hardly be noticed. The color itself is not so much better or worse as it is different. Some pages are better than Evergreen, but others look a little "hot" and this will offend those readers accustomed to a more flat, 'antique', gentle and pastel-like look from the earlier collections.
For the sake of future fans I hope Checker will consider a reprint of volume one and an update of volume two so we may finally have a nearly complete collection of Little Nemo strips. The six strip ommision in their current volume two was completely unnecessary and truly regrettable.
Book Review: A pleasant (and economical) surprise.
Summary: 4 Stars
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!