"Litle Nemo in Slumberland" dated September 29, 1907:
Transcript of Tweets by @LittleNemo1905; Guest Curated by @pfxbryan (SEPTEMBER 7, 2020):
The heat is suddenly on for Nemo and Impie, as a searchlight fires up, prompting them to flee their perch; there is a solid continuity on the height of the building, the pair taking roughly as long to climb down as the did to clamber up. - 1/17
#SideNote: This sequence gave me flashbacks to my misspent youth playing Rampage in the arcades. - 2/17 IMAGE GOES HERE
The citizenry seems to mostly go about their business, in spite of the two roughly thirty-foot-tall giants (they appear about twice as tall in the latter half of the comic, judging from the windows), though they swarm the docks in Panel 6. - 3/17
This is one of those moments that I think echoes down through culture; we have seen a giant-sized Nemo (and Flip) before, but here, wandering through the city, there are glimpses of the century to come. - 4/17
Was this strip in Merian Cooper’s mind when he conceived of King Kong? Comics have often been considered low culture, despite work like McCay’s, but the moment of climbing down the building reminds me of King Kong climbing up the Empire State Building. - 5/17
McCay has a fondness for giant things, like the turkey we saw all the way back in #7, and I firmly believe that he is the godfather of the kaiju/giant monster genre, with his film The Pet being perhaps the ur-example for film. - 6/7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s39jimMyAFI
The offer of a $9 trillion reward for Nemo raises a lot of questions to me about the Slumberland economy, but perhaps those are questions best left unasked (for the record, the world GDP in 1907 was something like $4 trillion). - 7/17
Is Morpheus a god to these people? Their king? The question arose previously whether the giants were meant to keep people out, yet they seemed unaware of their existence. The locals at least know Morpheus, which cements this being in Slumberland. - 8/17
This strip finally sees the return of Flip, crashing through the scenery in the penultimate panel, paying off our modern expectations of destruction (why have a tiny city that doesn’t get wrecked up Godzilla-style), the moment of relative calm shattered. - 9/17
Flip doesn’t do anything to actually wake up Nemo directly, but his very presence seems to have some effect. - 10/17
This reads to me as though Flip is invading from a separate strip; we don’t know exactly how Flip escaped, but he trundles through the buildings carelessly (Nemo and Impie, in their panics, don’t appear to have injured anyone or damaged anything). - 11/17
We’ve mentioned Dream of the Rarebit Fiend before, and there are a number of Nemo strips directly drawn from McCay’s less colorful work. The relevant strip here was published January 7, 1905: - 12/17 https://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/937
In DotRF, we have a giant drunk rampaging through New York, doing most of the things a giant drunk tourist (or King Kong) might do, carrying around a steamship, generally causing mayhem. - 13/17
While he is more intentionally destructive than Flip, his carelessness and style of dress (long coat, hat, and cigarette) are reminiscent of Flip…and the more problematic Irish stereotypes we’ve explored in the past. - 14/17
Perhaps it was unintentional, but this Rarebit Fiend might be the precursor to Slumberland’s resident trickster (even their facial expressions seem akin), but it does reawaken those uncomfortable racist, anti-Irish tropes, albeit perhaps unintentionally. - 15/17
Naturally, the arrival of Flip invites chaos into the mix once more, but readers would have to wait for the full consequences for another week. - 16/17
This is a reading of “Little Nemo in Slumberland” #102. What have I overlooked? - 17/17
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