"Little Nemo in Slumberland" dated July 03, 1910:
Transcript of Tweets by @LittleNemo1905; Guest Curated by @gipperfish (FEBRUARY 11, 2021):
The July 3, 1910 episode of Little Nemo is a holiday journey in a “sky bomb” firework, a trip called in the first panel “one of our best Fourth of July sports.”
Figure 1
Nemo and the gang settle into their pods, with Nemo worried about injury, as “we get hurt where we came from quite often.” The glib reply: “You can’t get hurt an’ what if you do? It’s the Fourth of July!”
The first five vertical panels allow the sky bomb to rise past city spires, into the star-filled sky. Nemo’s crew has been promised that they will go up some 500 miles. As they ascend, they are surrounded by more sky bombs and individuals floating up with them.
Figure 2
Then, the format of the page shifts to wide horizontal panels filled with explosions. In the first of these—the second labelled panel 5—their sky bomb separates them into separate floating balls, though our protagonists are revealed to be safe, however temporarily, in panel 6.
Figure 3
In the final two main panels, 7 and 8, each of the secondary fireworks explodes, and though Nemo exclaims “Oh Wheo! Bang! We do go to pieces!” the characters actually gently float down, with other around them calling the slow descent “solid comfort.” Nemo, having fallen from his bed, awakes in an inset panel number 9, with an off-panel voice asking is the noise was “a giant frack exploding or Nemo falling our of bed.”
The strip itself is fairly straightforward in terms of content, exploring another wild and somewhat surreal technology that gives Nemo and his companions a unique vantage point/experience and allows McCay to play with matters of scale and formal presentation. However, what interests me most is the afterlife of this particular strip, a portion of which Art Spiegelman included in his 1974 experimental comic “Ace Hole: Midget Detective.”
Figure 4
First published in Short Order Comix #2, and subsequently appearing Marvel’s Comix Book #1 and Spiegelman’s Breakdowns (1977), “Ace Hole” parodies a number of aesthetic traditions at once, combine its titular midget detective, in the style of Humphrey Bogart, with a noir plot that involves forged Picasso paintings, dames pulled straight from those works, such as “Woman in a Hat with Fur Coat” and a big bad, who is revealed to be Mr. Potato Head.
Figures 5-7
Early on, Ace is knocked out, just after discovering the forger, Floogleman (who looks suspiciously like Art Spiegelman) murdered, and falls does into an “inky pit.”
Figures 8-10
This turns out to be a journey through last panels of the July 3, 1910 Little Nemo strip, landing Ace Hole in Slumberland! Spiegelman retains both McCay’s art and captions of panels 7 and 8 of the Nemo strip, while placing his own art in place of panel 9 (though retaining McCay’s signature).
Figures 11
This appropriation allows Spiegelman to put Ace through a surreal journey, overseen by “The Ghost of Picasso,” which plays out over the next pages. Picasso offers cryptic aesthetic maxims while Floogleman/Spiegelman cries from a television.
Figures 12-13
When Ace comes to, another of Picasso’s portraits, this time the “Portrait of Marie-Thérèse” guides him toward the story’s final confrontation with Mr. Potato Head.
Figure 14-15
This plays out over a tour-de-force composition that juxtaposes Bambi, the 1954 Comics Code, and Picasso’s “Guernica,” as Ace kills Mr. Potato Head. (Readers are advised to send a potato to Spiegelman’s San Francisco address…)
Figures 16-18
Ace attempts to ride off into the sunset like the Lone Ranger on his steed, here a tiny dog, only to be forced to slink away.
Figures 19-20
While there is much more to say about “Ace Hole,”--which I cover in a forthcoming chapter in a volume on the comics of Art Spiegelman--I want to conclude by noting how Spiegelman uses Little Nemo as a portal into the surreal connections he wants to draw and satirize between high and low cultural objects. Spiegelman’s art converts these works into the same narrative space, proposing them as necessarily equivalent both for the story he wants to tell but also for the ways in which we must regard them going forward. All made possible by the inclusion of Little Nemo.
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