Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!

Little Nemo Splendid Sundays #1

by Winsor McCay (Writer/Artist), Peter Maresca (Editor)

Here are the dreams of all children, worlds of fantasy, humor, terror, and grand adventure. It was the greatest comic strip of its day, perhaps the greatest of all time, acclaimed the world over for its artistic majesty, unbounded imagination, and ground-breaking techniques that helped define a new art form. But since its debut 100 years ago, it has been all but impossible to view these masterpieces in their original size and colors.

LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND...
can now be seen as creator Winsor McCay intended: full broadsheet-sized and with glorious colors. The digitally-restored prints presented in incredible detail displaying the superb draftsmanship of the prolific McCay. Enjoy the Sunday morning experience shared by millions a century ago. Again, for the first time.

Genres: Comics, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Fiction, Art, Classics, Graphic Novels Comics

128 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Was an American cartoonist and animator, best known for the comic strip Little Nemo (begun 1905) and the animated cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). For legal reasons, he worked under the pen name Silas on the comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend.
A prolific artist, McCay's pioneering early animated films far outshone the work of his contemporaries, and set a standard followed by Walt Disney and others in later decades. His comic strip work has influenced generations of artists, including creators such as William Joyce, André LeBlanc, Moebius, Maurice Sendak, Chris Ware and Bill Watterson.

Reviews

[John Porcellino · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had flipped through some of Sunday Press's previous giant-sized hardbound classic comics collections (they're printed at the original tabloid size of the newspapers where they were first published), and even dropped the big bucks for their Gasoline Alley collection (one of my favorite comics ever), but it wasn't till I sat down with this edition that I really got what all the fuss is about. For the first time, I could imagine being a kid at the time, settling down on the floor with these immense sheets of artistic brillance and mystery spread before me. It must have been awe-inspiring. These fantasy comics make full use of the resources available to cartoonists of the time-- giant, mesmerizing worlds unfold before your eyes with each turn of the page. Mind-blowing.

[Elliott · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all time favorite comics. This edition is absolutely gorgeous - and big. This coffee table book is nearly the size of a coffee table and I partially expected little legs to fold out of the bottom like Kramer's coffe table book on coffee tables. Winsor McKay is a true artist.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now I finally understand why Sunday comics were critical in newspaper sale. The beauty of these pages are literally indescribable. You need to see in person to appreciate the spell of these pages. Dan Nadel's review at the Comics Journal is well written too. http://www.tcj.com/reviews/forgotten-...

[Sadie Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most beautiful books I've every seen. Feels like I could fall into the art.

[Robert Beerbohm · Rating 5 out of 5]

I supplied some of the comic strip pages for this wonderful tome. One of my favorite comic strip reprint books.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really incredible full-page newspaper comics from the turn of the 20th Century, reprinted in full size! The book is about 3 1/2 feet tall, making it both an imposing read and incredibly expensive. Fortunately, my library had a copy -- see if yours does too! You will not regret it.

Nemo is a young boy who has fantastic, immaculately envisioned and detailed dreams. The plots for these comics are fairly straightforward and silly, with Nemo either falling out of bed or being woken up by his parents at the end of every strip.

What is not straightforward is the design of the strips, which is consistently breathtaking. Panels expand and retract away from a standard grid to reflect the ever-shifting dimensions of Nemo's dreamscape. McCay's control over geometry in the service of creating depth in his linework is astonishing, as is the detail he crams into every panel. He must have been a dedicated naturalist -- his command over the form of plants and animals would be impressive if he were drawing textbooks, but to employ this skill in making comics?! Wow.

This is beautiful stuff, and the fact that it is over 100 years old boggles the mind -- nobody has done anything this good since.

[Rauf · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is the GREATEST comics. EVER.


The gist:

Nemo is a kid who constantly dreams about going to the kingdom of dream. But in each adventure, he keeps getting himself into this bizarre/fantastic/surreal/kinda dangerous situation and on the very LAST PANEL, it always shows Nemo wakes up and falls off his bed.


Brilliant, brilliant artwork by Winsor McCay. I don't know where he got his ideas. If you can't get this book, just Google the strips. It's always big and colorful and Nemo always met something new (be that creatures or outlandish situation) in his adventures.

Here's the kicker: this comic strip was made in 1905. It ran for 8 years. Over a century ago, someone already thought of this wicked and ground-breaking and edgy stories.
Today, you'd be very surprised how banal some comics can be, banal comics with terrible artworks.

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

McCay's layouts are wonderful and still fresh after a century of time. I found the repetitiveness of the story a bit boring to read straight through. Yet it makes sense when I think of the original context where these drawings were released one at a time each successive Sunday for a period of years. Some of the characters and scenarios were quite inventive and funny. Yet I could not really stomach the black face caricatures and figures like Yap. Though socially acceptable in White American society at the start of the 20th century, they are still spiteful and destructive to humanity.

[Gabrielle Danoux · Rating 5 out of 5]

Si votre médiathèque détient ce livre (car à l'achat même le généreux père Noël, n'a pas pu donner suite favorable à ma requête), je vous invite à aller le feuilleter au moins. J'avais pour ma part croisé sa route dans un livre d'Art Spiegelman et eu la chance de pouvoir le consulter à la médiathèque de Clermont-Ferrand. C'est au Cartoonmuseum Basel, il y a déjà plusieurs années je crois, que quelques planches ont été exposées, pour mon plus grand plaisir ainsi que celui de mes petits rêveurs.

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd read the high praise that Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman had for Winsor McCay, and reading these comics for the first time, it's hard not to be amazed that they were created in the first decade of the medium--the distance between them and Ware and Spiegelman feels very short. (For me, the difference is the emotional resonance of the contemporary works; formally and visually, there's little ground McCay hadn't already covered.)

McCay experiments with different arrangements of text and image--relying early on long captions that are a bit difficult to follow, in the strong middle years letting the images drive the story and using rather sparse talk bubbles, and in the late panels using longer talk bubbles to add more details to the plot. While that part of that variety is finding the best way to tell stories in comics, each approach works well for conveying a certain kind of dream experience, which is perfect when each page ends with our protagonist waking up from an eventful night's sleep.

My favorite panels are the ones that use varying frame sizes to fit the action or keep the frame size still to emphasize the scale of something moving in it--something Ware has really built on in his best work. For example, Nemo walking around on stilts among a flock of birds of various heights (Oct. 29, 1905), a massive elephant approaching us (Sep. 23, 1906), or the funhouse mirrors stretching the bodies of Nemo, Flip and Imp in Befuddle Hall (Feb. 2, 1908). Especially then, being able to see them in full-newspaper size is really a treat; the book is a bit awkward to handle, but reading it also feels quite different and special.

(Special thanks to the University of Missouri at Columbia for being the first library willing to interlibrary loan this book, since there was no way I could justify the $125 price tag I've seen on some copies.)

[XenofoneX · Rating 5 out of 5]

This colossal 16" x 21" volume reprints the best of Winsor McCay's earliest 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' Sunday pages, in their original broadsheet size. The thick archival stock has a matte finish that captures the original look and feel of newsprint but provides a smooth, acid-free, alternative with none of the various negatives. Seeing McCay's Art Nouveau-inspired linework at the size he intended it to be seen is a revelation; his endlessly imaginative pages seem so far ahead of their time, introducing ideas and techniques on a weekly basis that would shape the future of the comics medium. This gorgeous hardcover from Sunday Press, released in 2006 to celebrate the strip's 100th birthday, would prove successful enough to merit multiple printings and an equally spectacular sequel, 'Little Nemo in Slumberland: Many More Splendid Sundays', adding another 120 Sunday pages to the 100 collected in the first volume. This book was one of the key works that inspired the resurgence of interest in classic newspaper strips and the current 'golden age' of archival reprints. Sunday Press produced several more volumes in the broadsheet format devoted to strips like 'Gasoline Alley'; Sammy Harkham used the same format as the basis for the seventh instalment of his avant garde art-comics anthology 'Kramers Ergot', giving some of the world's most important cartoonists a chance to work in a much larger scale. A must for any Winsor McCay fan.

[Williwaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

So far as I know, this is the first book which reprints Winsor McCay's classic comic strip as it first appeared: in full-sheet newspaper dimensions. What a difference it makes!

McCay was the first genius-level artist of the comic strip. His colors, his imagination, and his optical inventiveness are unrivaled to this day. That says a lot, considering all the competition!

Be forewarned: this book is so large that it won't even fit on a normal bookshelf.

I love owing big books despite the storage issues. They make me feel a lot more important than I am!

[Connor Robertson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story revolves around a boy name Nemo and follows him around in his dreams, accompanied with the expressive visuals such as the one above. I’ll never forget the second time I ever looked through this book… I’ll never forget the first time, as well, but it wasn’t until the second time in which I really examined its beauty. A beautiful collection of comic strips that only broadens a child’s imagination! A perfect introduction to children who have seen the literature style of comics before, and great for any of those classroom artists and visual learners!

[Cmoore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. The format is fantastic, as it is the size of the original work, the Sunday paper. And it's in full color!

[Csaba Rusznyák · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly a window to another world, to a bygone era. Reading these reprints of the most colorful and imaginative fantasy stirps (in their original - huge - size) of the early 1900s I can at last begin to really undrestand the gigantic cultural impatct these comics had on an audience before the time of radios and television sets - back when this was the only mass media. And the works of artists like Lyonel Feininger and Winsor McCay are still wonderful and beautiful today.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

to see where chris ware comics in general comes from this is the edition to get. it is enormous. just a huge book that reproduces with accuracy the way the nemo strip originally appeared in the newspaper. a thing of beauty. fun to read and lovely to look at.

[Scott Radtke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is about the coolest most fantastic book ever, and it's gigantic and beautiful to boot. I am constantly looking at it and marveling at the humanity that can burst forth and create such a work of art. Rapturous.

[Fugo Feedback]

¿Por qué no me sorprende que la basura de Librarian que había arrasado con bocha de ediciones internacionales de varios comics de superhéroes también haya eliminado esta?
De momento, la vuelvo a subir, y espero que al infame Deleted Member lo pise un auto.

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly astounding. Little Nemo is among the most beautiful and whimsical comics in history. This treatment of printing the strips at original size (massive) and color matched to the original works of art is nothing less than a labor of love and a publishing gem.

[kubby · Rating 5 out of 5]

i've only seem snippets of it, but i'll already give it five stars
ps: this book is huge! bigger than small animals!

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Build a shelf for this massive tome

[Kami · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trippy and psychadelic.... unbelievable art. Pure pleasure.

[Trkutz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book.

[Christa Mcintyre · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most beautiful illustrators of all time. You can still see the influence of McCay in Disney,Sendak and Sesame Street.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pajama, pajama, pajama, PAJAMA!

I'm going to be the opposite of a trendsetter, so, Nemo is on my baby name list.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a great slice of history...presented in original size, this book is huge!

[Aimee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magnificent book full of McCay's surreal Sunday strips.

[Drazen Kozjan · Rating 5 out of 5]

These huge, gorgeous editions are like a dream come true.

[Lise · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVE Little Nemo in Slumberland. Totally far out.