Back to Slumberland

The good news from Comic-Con: IDW will publish new adventures of Winsor McCay’s little Nemo in Slumberland by top comics talent.

The great news: One of those creators is Eric Shanower.

The baffling news: He’s doing scripts, not art.

I've seen Eric’s McCay homages, most prominently in Promethea. I can’t imagine anyone doing them better. The other guy had better be good.

I Would Never Have Been Able to Choose

A while back I stumbled onto this page of theater listings from the New York Sun, 6 Dec 1908, archived in the Library of Congress’s “Chronicling America” website.

What brought me to this page was the announcement that L. Frank Baum would soon arrive in New York to present his “Fairy Logue and Radio Plays,” starting with a Monday matinee.

But I was immediately struck by all the other offerings, including others with Oz connections:

• David Montgomery and Fred Stone; having become stars playing the Tin Woodman and Scarecrow in the 1902 Wizard of Oz musical extravaganza, they were back on Broadway in The Red Mill.
• Bessie Wynn; having played Sir Dashemoff Daily in that show, she was featured comedienne at Hammerstein’s theater.
• Billie Burke; she would play Glinda in the 1939 MGM musical of The Wizard of Oz (which borrowed one episode from the stage show rather than Baum’s books).
• a show based on Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo. (Baum at one point suggested trying to recruit McCay to illustrate the Oz books instead of John R. Neill.)
• Musical readings of Henry W. Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn, no doubt including “Paul Revere’s Ride.”
• Lew Fields as performer and producer (with former partner Joe Weber presenting a rival play).
• Ethel Barrymore.
• Douglas Fairbanks.
• Maude Adams.
• William Gillette.
• Anna Held.
• Harry Lauder.
• George Arliss.
• Eugenie Blair, who reportedly gave her life playing Anna Christie fourteen years later.

And, at the Hippodrome, Schmergel’s Musical Elephants!

Weekly Dose of Surrealism from Winsor McCay

I think Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland comic pages are one of the great sustained masterpieces of twentieth-century art. At the same time, I've never been sure how to take in the words in those cartoons--the balloons in which Nemo offers a never-ending supply of "Oh!" and "Mama!" and "I'll get out of here, I will," and the like. Those words are often so distant in tone from the extraordinary scenes and action around them that I've wondered if we should take them as an ironic signal of Nemo's blandness.

Award-winning political cartoonist Ted Rall offered a more helpful perspective in a recent column:

...cartoons need great writing more than they need great art. Which is why Gary Larsen is better than Winsor McCay. "Little Nemo" was high art. "The Far Side" is hilarious.

In other words, McCay's words aren't pungent with hidden meaning; they're simply the big weakness in his work.

With that suggestion in mind, I took a fresh look at McCay's Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend. The following five panels all come from different 1905 installments of that strip.

Occasionally, the "ironic" reading seems appropriate.

In other cases, the panels would be better off without the words, or at least so many of them.

When the words do add to the images, they often undercut the prettiness of the surrealism. Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend was created for adult readers; McCay even used a pseudonym on this strip so as not to separate it from his work for children. So these are supposed to be true nightmares, not exciting sleepytime adventures. There's even a hostile tone to some of the most meaningful word balloons. All the more reason, I finally decided, to read only the first panel's words to understand the set-up, and then let McCay's art alone tell the rest of the story.

(Thanks to Sam Riddleburger for the link to Rall's column.)

Art Out of Its Mind

Without doubt the weirdest things I’ve read for months (and bear in mind I’m reading fantasies for the Cybils and mystical visions ascribed to George Washington) are some of the comics collected by Dan Nadel in Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries, 1900-1969.

Some of these comics bear out the rule that when there is seemingly unquenchable demand (“too many customers”), publishers expand their offerings. This can produce great innovation as well as mediocre and even horrendous work. Thus, in the early 1940s, when publishers couldn’t print comics fast enough, there was a market even for Fletcher Hanks’s Stardust the Super Wizard. It’s crappy on so many levels--storytelling, dialogue, draftsmanship--yet impossible to get out of your mind.

Similarly, the late 1960s underground comics seem to have printed anything, even Rory Hayes's nightmarish visions, which I can best summarize as “Snuggle the softener bear goes to Hell.” If only these hadn’t actually been published, connoisseurs might look at Hayes’s addictions and oddities and decide these pages qualify as “outsider art,” and are worth much, much more.

Most of the work collected in this volume comes from sane, talented artists who simply pushed the boundaries of the medium, either as those boundaries were becoming established and after they had become cliché. For example, in 1903-04 Gustave Verbeek drew a series of Sunday comics which started a simple story in panels left to right, top row to bottom—and then the reader turned the page upside-down and read the same panels from the new left to the new right, the new top to the new bottom. Nadel does a nice job of sorting out the comics by their area of greatest innovation: surreal storytelling, unique draftsmanship, humor, etc.

But even as the book analyzes those hard-working professional artists, there are touches of deep strangeness. Garrett Price’s Western newspaper comic sported not only a distinctively spare graphic style but also the title of (wait for it) White Boy. Norman E. Jennett got his start in North Carolina at a local newspaper called The Caucasian.

My favorite items in this collection reflect my fondness for Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland strips. Since many other people loved that comic page at the time, rival newspapers commissioned imitations from talented artists, and three appear in this book.

• Naughty Pete, by Charles Forbell (1913); only eleven episodes survive, all of them reprinted here
• Monkey Shines of Marcellus, by Norman E. Jennett (1905-1910), if only for its draftsmanship
  
• Harry Grant Dart's The Explorigator(s) (1908)—the most obvious Nemo imitation, and yet the one I want to see more of
  

The Explorigator lasted only fourteen episodes, so the book reprints 29% of its entire run. (Here, in fact, is 7%.) Unlike Nemo, who’s a bit colorless, each of Dart’s boy heroes has an outsized ambition to match his hat: Admiral Fudge, the Grenadier, Teddy Typewriter the journalist, Rubbersole the detective, et al. True to his name, Dart absolutely soared as an illustrator of the new age of airships.

Check out the Comics Reporter for some Art Out of Time preview pages and comments from Nadel. Reviews from Paul Gravett and the LA Weekly and an interview at The Comics Journal offer more sneak peeks.

Beyond the scope of Art Out of Time is another McCay imitation, Frank King’s Bobby Make-Believe, which I think suffers from condescension toward its young hero. Steve Moore and Eric Shanower created a latter-day homage to McCay and Dart with “Little Margie in Misty Magic Land” in 2003.