Little Nemo is a fictional character created by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. He originated in an early comic strip by McCay, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, before receiving his own spin-off series, Little Nemo in Slumberland. The full-page weekly strip depicted Nemo having fantastic dreams that were interrupted by his awakening in the final panel. The strip is considered McCay's masterpiece for its experiments with the form of the comics page, its use of color and perspective, its timing and pacing, the size and shape of its panels, and its architectural and other details.
Little Nemo in Slumberland ran in the New York Herald from October 15, 1905 until July 23, 1911. The strip was renamed In the Land of Wonderful Dreams when McCay brought it to William Randolph Hearst's New York American, where it ran from September 3, 1911 until July 26, 1914. When McCay returned to the Herald in 1924, he revived the strip, and it ran under its original title from August 3, 1924 until January 9, 1927, when McCay returned to Hearst.
Concept A weekly fantasy adventure, Little Nemo in Slumberland featured the young Nemo ("No one" in Latin) who dreamed himself into wondrous predicaments from which he awoke in bed in the last panel.
The first episode begins with a command from King Morpheus of Slumberland to a minion to collect Nemo. Nemo was to be the playmate of Slumberland's Princess, but it took months of adventures before Nemo finally arrived. A green, cigar-chewing clown named Flip was determined to disturb Nemo's sleep with a top hat emblazoned with the words "Wake Up". Nemo and Flip eventually become companions and are joined by an African Imp whom Flip finds in the Candy Islands. The group travels far and wide, from shanty towns to Mars, to Jack Frost's palace, to the bizarre architecture and distorted funhouse-mirror illusions of Befuddle Hall.
The strip shows McCay's understanding of dream psychology, particularly of dream fears—falling, drowning, impalement. This dream world has its own moral code, perhaps difficult to understand. Breaking it has terrible consequences as when Nemo ignores instructions not to touch Queen Crystalette who inhabits a cave of glass. Overcome with his infatuation, he causes her and her followers to shatter and awakens with "the groans of the dying guardsmen still ringing in his ears".
Although the strip began October 15, 1905, with King Morpheus, ruler of Slumberland, making his first attempt to bring Little Nemo to his realm. Nemo did not get into Slumberland until March 4, 1906. Due to Flip's interfering, Nemo did not get to see the Princess until July 8. His dream quest is always interrupted, either by his falling out of bed, Nemo suddenly waking up, or by his parents forcing him to wake up.
On July 12, 1908, McCay made a major change of direction: Flip visits Nemo and tells him that he has had his uncle destroy Slumberland (it had been dissolved before, into day, but this time it appeared to be permanent). After this, Nemo's dreams take place in his home town, though Flip—and a curious-looking boy named the Professor—accompany him. These adventures range from the down-to-earth to Rarebit-fiend type fantasy; one very commonplace dream had the Professor pelting people with snowballs. The famous "walking bed" story was in this period. Slumberland continued to make sporadic appearances until it returned for good on December 26, 1909.
Story-arcs included Befuddle Hall, a voyage to Mars (with a well-realized Martian civilization), and a trip around the world (including a tour of New York City).
Style McCay experimented with the form of the comics page, its timing and pacing, the size and shape of its panels, perspective, and architectural and other detail. From the second installment, McCay had the panel sizes and layouts conform to the action in the strip: as a forest of mushrooms grew, so did the panels, and the panels shrank as the mushrooms collapsed on Nemo. In an early Thanksgiving episode, the focal action of a giant turkey gobbling Nemo's house receives an enormous circular panel in the center of the page. McCay also accommodated a sense of proportion with panel size and shape, showing elephants and dragons at a scale the reader could feel in proportion to the regular characters. McCay controlled narrative pacing through variation or repetition, as with equally-sized panels whose repeated layouts and minute differences in movement conveyed a feeling of buildup to some climactic action.
In his familiar Art Nouveau-influenced style, McCay outlined his characters in heavy blacks. Slumberland's ornate architecture was reminiscent of the architecture designed by McKim, Mead & White for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, as well as Luna Park and Dreamland in Coney Island, and the Parisian Luxembourg Palace.
McCay made imaginative use of color, sometimes changing the backgrounds' or characters' colors from panel to panel in a psychedelic imitation of a dream experience. The colors were enhanced by the careful attention and advanced Ben Day lithographic process employed by the Heralds printing staff. McCay annotated the Nemo pages for the printers with the precise color schemes he wanted.
For the first five months the pages were accompanied with captions beneath them, and at first the captions were numbered. In contrast to the high level of skill in the artwork, the dialogue in the speech balloons is crude, sometimes approaching illegibility, and "disfigur otherwise flawless work", according to critic R. C. Harvey. The level of effort and skill apparent in the title lettering highlights what seems to be the little regard for the dialogue balloons, their content, and their placement in the visual composition.
McCay used ethnic stereotypes prominently in Little Nemo, as in the ill-tempered Irishman Flip, and the nearly-mute African Impie.
Background Winsor McCay ( – 1934) had worked prolifically as a commercial artist and cartoonist in carnivals and dime museums before he began working for newspapers and magazines in 1898. In 1903, he joined the staff of the New York Herald family of newspapers, where he had success with comic strips such as Little Sammy Sneeze (1904–06). and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (1904–11)
In 1905, McCay got "an idea from the Rarebit Fiend to please the little folk". That October, the full-page Sunday strip Little Nemo in Slumberland debuted in the Herald. Considered McCay's masterpiece, its child protagonist, whose appearance was based on McCay's son Robert, had fabulous dreams that would be interrupted with his awakening in the last panel. McCay experimented with the form of the comics page, its timing and pacing, the size and shape of its panels, perspective, architectural and other detail.
Publication history Little Nemo in Slumberland debuted on the last page of the Sunday comics section of The New York Herald newspaper, on October 15, 1905. The full-page, color comic strip ran until July 23, 1911. In spring 1911, McCay moved to William Randolph Hearst's New York American and took Little Nemos characters with him. The Herald held the strip's copyright, but McCay won a lawsuit that allowed him to continue using the characters. In the American, the strip ran under the title In the Land of Wonderful Dreams. The Herald was unsuccessful in finding another cartoonist to continue the original strip.
McCay left Hearst in May 1924 and returned to the Herald Tribune. He began Little Nemo in Slumberland afresh on August 3 of that year. The new strip displayed the virtuoso technique of the old, but the panels were laid out in an unvarying grid. Nemo took a more passive role in the stories, and there was no continuity. The strip came to an end in January 1927, as it was not popular with readers. Hearst executives had been trying to convince McCay to return to the American, and they succeeded in 1927. Due to the lack of the 1920s Nemo's success, the Herald Tribune signed over all copyrights to the strip to McCay for one dollar.
In 1937, McCay's son Robert attempted to carry on his father's legacy by reviving Little Nemo. Comic book packager Harry "A" Chesler's syndicate announced a Sunday and daily Nemo strip, credited to "Winsor McCay, Jr." Robert also drew a comic-book version for Chesler called Nemo in Adventureland featuring grown-up versions of Nemo and the Princess. Neither project lasted long. Production continued on both after the syndicate was closed in 1938, being utilized in various comic books including Cocomalt Comics and Blue Ribbon, published by MLJ Publications (later Archie Publications). Chesler closed his shop (the first of several times) around 1940. Street & Smith ran Little Nemo in 1942 in Shadow Comics. In 1945, McCay was again with Chesler’s shop, producing Little Nemo in Adventureland for Red Seal and Punch Comics until 1947, when the shop closed down for the final time.Bob McCay at the Lambiek Comiclopedia
In 1947, Robert and fabric salesman Irving Mendelsohn organized the McCay Feature Syndicate, Inc. to revive the original Nemo strip from McCay's original art, modified to fit the size of modern newspaper pages. This revival also did not last. The McCay-Richardson Syndicate distributed this version from approximately March to December 1947.
In 1966, cartoonist Woody Gelman discovered the original artwork for many Little Nemo strips at a cartoon studio where McCay's son Bob had worked. In 1973, Gelman published a collection of Little Nemo strips in Italy. His collection of McCay originals is preserved at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University.
In 2005, collector Peter Maresca self-published a volume of Nemo Sundays as Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays! via his Sunday Press Books. The volume was large enough to reproduce the pages at their original size, as they appeared in newspapers. Restoration work took Maresca between five and twenty hours per page. A second volume, Little Nemo in Slumberland: Many More Splendid Sundays!, appeared in 2008.
Adaptations Theatre
As early as 1905, several abortive attempts were made to put Little Nemo on stage. In summer 1907, Marcus Klaw and A. L. Erlanger announced they would put on an extravagant Little Nemo show for an unprecedented $100,000, with a score by Victor Herbert and lyrics by Harry B. Smith. It starred Gabriel Weigel, an actor with dwarfism, as Nemo, Joseph Cawthorn as Dr. Pill, and Billy B. Van as Flip. Reviews were positive, and it played to sold-out houses in New York. It went on the road for two seasons. McCay brought his vaudeville act to each city where Little Nemo played. When a Keith circuit refused to let McCay perform in Boston without a new act, McCay switched to the William Morris circuit, with a $100-a-week raise. In several cities, McCay brought his son, who sat on a small throne dressed as Nemo as publicity.