"Little Nemo in Slumberland" dated March 07, 1909:
Transcript of Tweets by @LittleNemo1905 (NOVEMBER 26, 2020):
Look. I totally get what McCay was going for here… turning a seemingly mundane and normal experience into a radically different (and intensely fantastical) one. - 1/15
It actually kind of works for me. - 2/15
The transformation from the ice into his grandfather's head is a successful one actually… and the gray hairs adequately surprised me. - 3/15
I had initially thought the spiky gray in the bottom right corner of panel 7 was water splashing up form Flip's impact… obviously, at panel 8, that's no longer a possibility (though I guess if it was cold enough…). - 4/15
The recognition that they are, in fact, climbing down a human face came as quite a shock to me… which strikes me as important/possible only because I was reading this particular strip digitally (as opposed to in the Taschen). - 5/15
I think that if I'd been reading the full newspaper-style page, I'd probably have known what was coming… this reinforces for me how material concerns really impact the way that #LittleNemo is read today. - 6/15
I'm not sure that I've have enjoyed this strip half as much if it hadn't come as a surprise to me as I was reading it… the fact that I had to scroll to see the bottom two tiers on CSL aided that. - 7/15
That doesn't discount a print readers enjoyment though. Maybe a reader who encountered this strip in print was simply excited to see how/why the transformation was occurring? - 8/15
Another thing: the boys' size/scale changes significantly throughout the strip… they begin as little more than fleas on top of the man's head, seemingly get a little bigger as they climb down his nose and, by the time he's off, are the largest they've been. - 9/15
Part of me wonders if the "skating on top of his grandfather's head" part of the strip is just a trick and the real driving force of this strip is that their size is changing. - 10/15
Think about it. They started out enjoying a nice skate on a very flat surface, which quickly became hilly, and by the time the strip ends, there isn't a flat surface on his head; it's completely round! - 11/15
They're constant "growing" would certainly explain how this could happen, so I'm sticking with that… the final growth would be Nemo waking up regular sized! - 12/15
It also makes sense that the man whose face was prominently featured in his dream is that of his grandfather! Especially if they had a wager on who would wake up first! Nemo probably went to sleep thinking about it! - 13/15
Sure, this is one of the stranger strips that we've seen and really comes out of absolutely nowhere! … but I kind of enjoy it specifically for that reason! - 14/15
This is my reading of "Little Nemo in Slumberland" #178. What's yours ? - 15/15