"Little Nemo in Slumberland" dated February 01, 1925:
Transcript of Tweets by @LittleNemo1905 (SEPTEMBER 13, 2021):
I can, with all honesty, say that until this very moment, I have never been interested in learning about the invention of the slow plow… and I live in CANADA! - 1/15
This strip reads *exactly* like it should… a little kid imagining the invention of a somewhat useful/somewhat ridiculous machine with absolutely ZERO idea how that machine would actually work. - 2/15
Flip and Slivvers (as extensions of Nemo's dreaming unconscious mind) just babble on nonsensically about machine parts and parts that have come loose… it's actually quite funny! - 3/15
Sure, this could be explained away pretty easily as Slumberlandian mechanical parts that we simply don't have in the waking world (I'm sure that's how Nemo's dreaming subconscious justifies it), but to this reader, it's just absurd and comical. - 4/15
Even *more* comical is the amount of money that the pair receive for the invention. I mean… with inflation that $1,000,000,000.00 in 1925 would be the equivalent today of 15,600,000,000.00 today… approximately. - 5/15
Couple this with the final tiers visual gags (the laughably large bags of money that Scrooge McDuck would be jealous of and the swanky new clothes and cane the pair are wearing in panel 12) and I was actually laughing out loud at certain points. - 6/15
I think it is a really nice change of pace that nothing extraordinarily bad happens in this strip… sure, Impie, Pill and Figures get walloped by snowballs, but (in panel 11) the boys reveal their goodwill by making some reparations! - 7/15
What is most important here, is the fact that there are THREE bags for the THREE victims! Though Impie isn't pictured in panel 11, the fact that he was one of the three victims suggests that he would be the recipient of one of the three bags. - 8/15
This is a subtle, but pretty meaningful moment. Past strips would've largely ignored Impie's suffering. While it's true that this one acknowledges it very quietly, I think it's important that it's acknowledged at all. - 9/15
Now, it was the fella's yell in panel 9 that got me researching snow plow history… he says to the pair, "You've solved a problem!" I wanted to know how? - 10/15
Snow Plows have been around since the late 1800s (though in a *very* different capacity) and car-mounted snowplows even became a thing in the 1920s! - 11/15
So what exactly was the "problem" that was solved? Well, maybe it was the way that snow removal didn't actually remove snow, but rather moved it around? - 12/15
The snow ball machine would solve that problem because the snow was being launched into orbit! But (apparently) street parking was all but forbidden in the 1920/1930s… - 13/15
I feel like I'm over thinking this… it was probably just the problem of snow more generally… but I did enjoy the exploration of snow removal history! Anyone else have any thoughts here? - 14/15
This is my reading of "Little Nemo in Slumberland" #448. What's yours? - 15/15