Little Nemo in Slumberland: Volume 1

Throughout the 20th century, newspaper comic strips have been a staple of American popular culture. Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo In Slumberland" was a color comic strip that debuted in the New York 'Hearld' on October 15, 1905 and achieved an immense popularity almost overnight. It continued to be published until December 1913, when McCay was pressed by his editor to suspend the series in order to concentrate on editorial cartooning. In August 1924 McCay revived the comic strip and it ran for an additional three years. Now the Checker Book Publishing Group has brought out a photomechanical reprint in full color of all of the strips from the first episode in 1905 though August 15, 1909. Also included in this impressive first volume are forty-three strips comprising 'Tales of the Jungle Imps', as well as samples of original promotional material, play bills, posters, early Nemo merchandising, and more. Of immense nostalagic interest and a superb example of early American newspaper cartoon strips, "Winsor McCay's Little Nemo In Slumberland; Volume One" is also highly recommended because it makes available to a whole new generation of readers the wonderful adventures of Nemo, Flip, The Princess, and a cast of memorable characters.

There's never been a Sunday funny like "Little Nemo in Slumberland," now brilliantly recaptured after a century during which comics fans knew about it but few had seen much of it. Volume 1 includes all the New York Herald strips from 1905 to August 1909, in color and in a generous size, though smaller than the original. Winsor McCay's imagination in Little Nemo was so wild that it is hard to reduce to words. Nemo is a small boy, about 4 or 5 at the start, who is invited to Slumberland, "the most wonderful place in the sky," by King Morpheus to play with the princess, his small but very sophisticated looking daughter. Nemo has to traverse many dangerous territories to get there, and for the first year or so he never makes it. The adventure opens with Nemo racing through the stars on a prancing pony, competing against rabbits riding pigs and monkeys on kangaroos. That's tame. The world of Nemo's dreams quickly becomes far stranger -- and even odder to us today, because some of McCay's extravagances of a century ago seem quaint today. For example, in a Christmas strip he imagines Santa "coming with the speed of an automobile," 60 miles an hour. Whoosh! It is also amusing to note how different the lives of little boys were a hundred years ago. Nemo's parents attribute his thrashings -- he usually ends up falling out of bed -- to eating too much rich food after supper, and at one point his daddy threatens to give him "another dose of turpentine and sugar." Apart from a fascination with automobiles, fast steamships and balloons, the modern world seldom impinges on Nemo's world. Although by 1908 the Wright Brothers were flying an airplane around Europe, no airplanes show up in the strip. McCay had a sense of wonder but not much sense of humor. Satire breaks out in a single strip when Nemo's house is crushed by his mother's overgrown picture hat. And once, for a few weeks in 1908, Nemo gets a social conscience and goes slumming, where he uses a magic wand to cure the ills of the poor people in Shantytown. Pure fantasy is the subject of 99 percent of the strips, which leaves them as fresh today as when new. Although some historians give Charles Schultz the credit for breaking the boundary of the comic frame, even though Walt Kelly did it before him, "Little Nemo in Slumberland" shows that McCay did it nearly a half century before either of them -- first, apparently, in a short-lived strip called "Little Jimmy Sneeze." Volume 1 offers very little text, but it includes the complete file of "Tales of the Jungle Imps" that appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1903, plus an assortment of proof sheets, advertising, Little Nemo games and a poster for a Little Nemo stage spectacle with a score by Victor Herbert. Checker has published a dozen volumes of McCay's work, including his political cartoons from the World War I era and "Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend," which some critics consider to have been as innovative as "Nemo," although it was not as great as success