"Little Nemo in Slumberland" dated October 06, 1907:
Transcript of Tweets by @LittleNemo1905; Guest Curated by @pfxbryan (SEPTEMBER 8, 2020):
For one last time, I am Dr. Peter Cullen Bryan (@pfxbryan), and we’ll be talking about the end of Nemo and the gang’s adventure in the little city. - 1/16
Flip has now rejoined the team, bringing with him a swath of destruction that is not perhaps malicious, but has nevertheless left the city in flames. Certainly, it seems less intentional than selling Jack Frost’s palace to the High Price Ice Company. - 2/16
I believe Flip when he says “I didn’t mean to,” as he quickly leads the other in splashing water on the raging inferno, though it is late enough that most of the buildings have been reduced to their skeletal steel structures. - 3/16
Flip, as the id of the trio, is not one to think things through and consider consequences, at least if we allow for a rudimentary psychoanalytic reading of the comic. Alternatively, Flip is simply a destructive force of nature because it is fun for the audience. - 4/16
The tiny navy finally gets involved; perhaps the locals could put some weight behind their earlier threat to arrest Nemo and Impie, though even the fleets seems relatively harmless (this is another moment that hearkens forward to the kaiju film). - 5/16
Flip, for his part, suffers the brunt of the assault, and deservedly so, though the retribution seems entirely disproportionate in his favor, considering the wide-scale devastation he (carelessly, if accidentally) wrought. - 6/16
I love the steel skeletons in Panel 5; there is a great attention to detail there, especially as the upper levels bend and twist, lacking support, and McCay shows his young readers a part of the city that they were not likely to see. - 7/16
The use of fire also might speak to McCay’s history; he would have been a baby when the Great Michigan Fire occurred in 1871, albeit on the other side of the state, which occurred concurrently with the Great Chicago fire (and the Winsor Fire as well). - 8/16
Certainly, these fires were within living memory for the generation that preceded McCay, and smaller fires occurred from period logging techniques; Canemaker tells of a young Winsor etching a drawing of a fire into a frosty windowpane, enjoining his origin to fire (p. 20). - 9/16
McCay’s short stature was mentioned earlier in this arc, with the enlarged Nemo as some response to his own feelings, and I wonder if fire, too, is some way of dealing with certain anxieties (as Dream of the Rarebit Fiend often seemed to be)? - 10/16
In any case, I am sad to leave the city behind; there is a certain vitality in McCay’s view of the city, and he has always seemed to have some special fascination with those spaces, capturing the mixture of grime, scale, anxiety, and life intrinsic in those spaces. - 11/16
One of my great Impossible Dreams is to see the full version of Gertie on Tour, in which the titular dinosaur visits America, which regrettably exists only a as a short fragment (and was probably never completed), building on those elements we see here. - 12/16
On the bright side, we will return to the urban space eventually, including one of the best-known arcs of Little Nemo (“Shanty Town”), and we will get to enjoy a proper tour of period New York City in due course, but we’ll be back to more episodic adventures for the moment. - 13/16
In any case, I want to thank @zjarondinelli for the opportunity to guest curate these strips, before my semester is inevitably destroyed by the arrival of my own personal Flip (adjuncting at two universities while trying to maintain my scholarship). - 14/16
We will be back to our regularly scheduled content in this space; special thanks to @Totter87 and @AlexxKay for their usual insights, among others; I have a new appreciation for the amount of work that goes into this project. - 15/16
This is an extended reading of “Little Nemo in Slumberland” #104. I’ll see you in the comments! - 16/16
Comments