"Little Nemo in Slumberland" dated October 22, 1905.
Transcript of Tweets by @LittleNemo1905 (May 28, 2020):
There are some very interesting elements at play here in the second #LittleNemoinSlumberland strip. - 1/18
Again, this strip begins by reminding the reader of King Morpheus' dominating influence. The first tier of panels is a triptych depicting the King, his daughter, and the Oomp (from strip #1). - 2/18
Notice how the King's body can't be restricted to a single panel? Compared to his daughter and Oomp, Morpheus is gigantic. This is another meaningful inscription of the affect of scale; his body, like his presence, is so large that it can't be contained by a single panel. - 3/18
Tier 2 begins the downward progression that will continue throughout the strip and eventually culminate in the collapse of the mushroom forest. - 4/18
Arguably, this is the strips defining quality; the spatial design of the page responds to the storyworld and responds accordingly, imitating it to enhance the effect. - 5/18
Notice how the bed is the first thing to descend? In this way, the furniture designed to signify sleep (his bed) actually takes on the role of vehicle for his journey. This is juxtaposed against the first strip where an external vehicle (Somnus) is required. - 6/18
I love the way that panels 9 & 10 in tier 3 utilize the spatial mode. As the panels extend to accommodate the gargantuan mushrooms, you also have the added impact of Nemo's shrinking (affect of scale). This makes the dramatic collapse of the mushrooms much more impactful. - 7/18
Panels 11-13 feel tremendously important because of this. Not only is the danger of the falling mushroom caps and stalks is heightened, but there is a claustrophobic effect that develops as a result of the simultaneously collapsing panels. - 8/18
Panel 14, then, becomes a respite from the peril as Nemo, and the reader, find themselves back in his bedroom with the protective presence of his father. Finally now, Nemo and the reader both can breathe peacefully. - 9/18
There's also a fun little allusion to "Dream of The Rarebit Fiend" here. That strip, McCay's longest running from 1904-1925, frequently featured nightmarish dreams that the characters would blame, in the final panel, on their consumption of the traditional Welsh dish. - 10/18
Here, Nemo's papa blames the "nightmare" on his having eaten raisin cake before bed. Whether the children for which the Nemo strips were aimed would have been familiar with McCay's far more adult-oriented DotRF, seems an interesting, if unanswerable, question. - 11/18
A final word must be said about the captions in this strip. Unlike the first, these caption boxes continue from one to the next as if written for prose; occasionally, they even continue sentences left over from the previous captions. - 12/18
This can be seen in caption 2 --> 3 and again in the sequence of captions 8-11. I find this particularly interesting as a result of my quasi-confusion of the reading order in the first strip. - 13/ 18
Based on the spatial design, a reader can only assume the path to be panel content, numbered caption content, back to panel content then caption content, and so on until finishing the strip. - 14/18
This strip complicates that though… if the reader is meant to follow the spatial design of the page, then the caption content is sometimes interrupted mid-sentence by panel content. - 15/18
This seems odd, and incredibly clunky. From a reader's perspective, it makes it difficult to read and yanks you from the beautiful surreal storyworld rendered by McCay on the full newspaper page. - 16/18
That said, I found myself reading these moments in a new light based on contributions of @barpos and @pfxbryan yesterday... Whether a trace of McCay's anxiety or experimentation with comics' form, how the captions evolve tells us much about the process of their creation. - 17/18
This is my reading of "Little Nemo in Slumberland #2". What's yours ? - 18/18