"Little Nemo in Slumberland" dated June 10, 1906:
Transcript of Tweets by @LittleNemo1905 (JULY 1, 2020):
This strip really gives us our first true introduction to the "wise guy of Slumberland", Dr. Pill. - 1/28
True to his name, he gives Nemo a pill in panel (labelled) 2, but what does the pill actually do is the question that this strip wants us to reckon with. - 2/28
Candy warns us that the passage Nemo and crew are about to enter can potentially be a dangerous place for those who don't belong there. This should prepare us for what we're to encounter as Nemo goes through the tunnels towards the palace. - 3/28
But how can we be certain that the visions(?) presented in the third and fourth tier aren't simply brought on by the pill given to Nemo by the "good" doctor? I'd suggest that two possibilities exist, here. - 4/28
Option A: The tunnels themselves are sentient and the demon faces, potato bug, frightening birds, and alligator are an always present threat to those who may trespass within. - 5/28
Option B: The visions (nightmares?) are brought on by the pill given by Dr. Pill and, rather than help him stay asleep as he was supposed to, ultimately causes him to wake up. - 6/28
My personal reading acknowledges the latter for a couple of reasons. First, there is no indication of the tunnels insidiousness until after Nemo has taken the pill. Second, no one is overly confident in Dr. Pill (See Candy's comment in the second last panel)… - 7/28
…And third, the flamingo-like bird in panel (labelled) 5 looks JUST like the "love birds" from strip #3 (Oct. 29, 1905), meaning that this terror could have been ripped straight from Nemo's painful memory of "being speared". - 8/28 [INSERT IMAGE]
BUT, if the alternative is true and it is in fact the tunnel's natural defense mechanisms turning on Nemo, this creates a really neat reading too that connects to something I noticed yesterday. - 9/28
In last week's strip, we became aware of a "tether" between the Princess and Nemo; at the very least, we know the Princess' existence relies on a playmate, and possibly on Nemo, specifically. I posited that this had something to do with reality/surreality. - 10/28
If Nemo is the required piece of the Princess' puzzle, it's possible that he is her "real" counterpart; she can only be whole if he is with her. Now, consider how this might be impacted if a foreign medicine of "surreal" origin is introduced to Nemo's "real" body? - 11/28
Is it possible that the tunnel rejecsd him and introduced the terrors because Nemo had ingested a concoction of the dreamworld, which rendered him "less real" than he was before? If his "realness" is a key component to his purpose in Slumberland, this could be disastrous! - 12/28
Off the top of my head, I don't recall Nemo having eaten or taken a drink of anything in Slumberland before now… so the reading may have some legs? - 13/28
Ultimately, I don't think the strip gives us the opportunity to decisively decide though, it is purposefully vague to the point that either possibility/reading could be true. - 14/28
I do however lean towards the second option, if only because of the comment made by his parents in the final panel (apart from my previous reasons). - 15/28
One of them tells the other that Nemo will need "ANOTHER" dose of medicine, which indicates to me a linguistic suggestion that dreamscape pill/waking world medicine has caused what we've seen. It's nothing definitive, mind you, but it's something. - 16/28
My absolute, hands down favourite formal complexity of this strip is the temporal dissonance that the top tier creates from the rest of the strip. - 17/28
I've always found it fascinating that McCay doesn't label the top tier as panel 1; you'll notice how I almost always include (labelled) when talking about the panels because the numbers assigned are always one behind what I believe they should be. - 18/28
More often than not, I've simply shrugged this off as McCay suggesting that it occurs either BEFORE the action that his strip presents (early strips) or AFTER the action (more recent ones). This strip's top tier though, does neither. - 19/28
The action within the top tier of this strip is happening at the exact same temporal moment as the content below it. The Slumberlandians actually watch the action we are about to read unfold as our eyes scan their backs while they vaguely comment on it. - 20/28
By the time we start reading the strip then, we've experience time-travel; we're already back in time, re-experiencing the action from a vantage point that we are more accustomed to. 21/28
Comics communicate through the logic of space (unlike film or television that communicate through the logic of time), meaning that presenting co-temporalities can often be difficult. Here though, McCay knocks it out of the park. - 22/28
Leaving this panel out of the numbering of the rest of the strip makes perfect sense because it is occurring literally at the same time as them… McCay could have playfully labelled that top tier as 1-6, and then restarted again with 1 in tier 2. - 23/28
This would've made far too explicit what I believe the strip wants to convey (and would be too on the nose for McCay, imo), which is that time, particularly in the dreamworld, is not a stable constant. - 24/28
Indeed, this is embodied by the materiality of the strip itself as a Sunday strip. We've discussed this before, but it bears repeating here; the fact that Nemo is published only weekly impacts both the internal narrative and external presentation. - 25/28
That McCay is willing to challenge traditional temporalities in comics here though (even if it is slight and with little narrative purpose), is a meaningful recognition of the power that spatial design has as a co-communicator. - 26/28
Today, the conceptualization of the "spatio-temporal system" (Groensteen) as foundational to the architecture of the comics page is fairly well-established, so it is interesting to see this type of exploration of space and time in the early 20th Century. - 27/28
This is my reading of "Little Nemo in Slumberland #35". What's yours? - 28/28