Littérautre / Little Nemo and the Changing World / 2013 Critique littéraire / Little Nemo and the Changing World / 2013
On the 15th of October, 1905,
the little boy in pyjamas
made his first appearance in
the New York Herald for what
would become a real walk of
fame. Little Nemo was one of the first comics that
paved the way to many others, opening the way
to the audio-visual era which would follow. One
could say that his father, Winsor McCay, arrived
just in time. Indeed, this is when newspapers edi-
tors realised the potential of this simple set of cas-
es on the bottom of the back page: a real goldmine.
The apparent simplicity of the scheme made
his success. Nemo finds himself in the middle of
an exciting adventure, which suddenly becomes
scarring. At the moment he finds himself in real
danger, he wakes up and realises he is lying in his
bed, safe and sound.
Winsor McCay had already explored such a re-
petitive path with another character before Nemo.
Little Sammy Sneeze was a short gag format made
of six squares. The plot was organized around
the little hero who wants to sneeze. The comic
showed the preparation (four squares), process
(one square), and consequence of the sneeze (one
square), which usually ended in a little disaster.
The little six year-old is now 108 years old but his enchanting world hasn’t stopped bringing sparkles in the eyes setting on its colourful and vertiginous pages. The father of Little Nemo in Slumberland was a pioneer of the comic world. He lived in the changing Ameri-ca of big fortunes, skyscrapers and dawning amusement parks. It is enough to give a context, a landscape and some spices to the adven-tures of the well-behaved little boy and his mischievous companions.
Little Nemo andthe changing world
The innocence of Little Sammy, coupled with a
devastating humour, made the whole success of it.
This simple and repetitive pattern, coupled
with an incredible sense of imagination, reflected
the world of childhood - so well, actually, that we
could almost believe that all these stories came out
of a child’s imaginary.
From hours of observation in Sunday fairs,
while thrill attractions developed in the New
York of 1905, McCay developed extremely so-
phisticated drawing techniques. This is when the
cartoonist moved to the city of Sheepshead Bay,
close to Coney Island and its fashionable theme
parks. McCay’s first plate of Little Nemo in Slum-
berland was directly inspired from one of these
parks; illustrating a wooden horse race on a flut-
tered track. While watching Nemo walking on
stilts, surrounded by multicolour storks, or trave-
ling among the skyscrapers on a walking bed, the
reader can almost feel Nemo’s vertigo through the
breath-taking perspectives.
Author Winsor McCay was caught with a pas-
sion of drawing at a very young age, and built his
own world, one stone at a time. It is made of the
questions and fears, hopes and dreams, of some-
one who has never really entered the adult world.
His passion for funfairs, which were inseminated
in his youth, never left him, as his colourful and
festive universe shows. Or maybe are we going too
fast?
We could suspect that the father of the little
Nemo was not as innocent as he seemed. By calling
his character Nemo, he already gave him a second
dimension. “Young Nemo is cramped in his good
education: he endures life rather than he controls
it. He is no one (nemo) outside of the adult’s de-
sire to see him as a well-behaved child, a desire
which is reiterated in the end of each episode, in
an almost obsessive way”, says essayist and novel-
ist Jean-Marie Apostolides.
Despite his innocence, Nemo is the cement of
the stories he endures. It is him King Morpheus
wants as his daughter’s companion of game - In
his adventures, Nemo attempts to reach the realm
of Slumberland where both live, and falls in a
series of parallel adventures. Furthermore, the
characters who revolve around Nemo owe him
their identity. Because Nemo is so neutral, they
can bring out all their fancies. Because he is so
well-behaved, they can exteriorise their wicked-
ness, and give a second reading to the story.
They are Nemo’s recurrent companions of
road, known as Flip and Jungle Imp. Flip follows
the boy rather than accompanying him. Always
represented with a cigar in his mouth, he is the
opposite of the calm Nemo, and tries to impose
himself in the boy’s quest for Slumberland, bring-
ing extra danger on the way. Nemo tries to get rid
of him many times - without much success. Jungle
Imp is a black character inspired by Tales of the
Jungle Imps, a previous work by Winsor McCay.
He is presented as a savage who doesn’t speak
English but always expresses himself with rum-
bling sounds. With this barrier of language, Nemo
and Flip eventually stop listening to him. And yet,
the Jungle Imp always achieves his own ends.
Littérautre / Little Nemo and the Changing World / 2013
“ Slumberland is the American
dream (...) or, more accurately:
it is the unexpected encounter
between the main character’s
melancholy and the gigantism
of a nation, overlooking a huge theme park ”
Littérautre / Little Nemo and the Changing World / 2013
Although it is hard to know if it is directly
inspired from McCay, this type of interaction
between the main characters was repeated nu-
merously after Nemo. Herge used it in his com-
ics Tintin, where the hero’s closest friend Cap-
tain Haddock, a grumpy and often soaked sailor,
brings all the flavour in the two men’s adventures,
while Tintin is the voice of reason and never acts
inconsiderately. In the French comics Asterix,
authors Uderzo and Goscinny follow the same
pattern while giving their blank main character a
goofball, fat giant as companion, by the name of
Obelix. “Because the main character is nothing –
or not much, every reader can identify himself to
him, and step into his shoes.” Apostolides says.
He adds that this identification is not only psy-
chological, as the character of Tintin shows: “the
reader can identify to the round shape of his face,
its neutrality.”
McCay wants the reader to feel comfortable,
and this is another reason why he gives a repeti-
tive pattern to his comics. Wherever Nemo goes in
his dreamed quest for Slumberland, whatever he
meets on his way and whoever he encounters, he
will always finish right in his bed. A classic wooden
bed with a white blanket and big pillow – anyone
who read a few of Nemo’s stories are familiar with
this image. Along the years, the boy’s little room
never changes. Just like him, it is neutral and sta-
ble, Jean-Marie Apostolides notes: “In the case of
Nemo, the bed itself plays a role. It places us in a
situation of equality in our situation of sleepers,
and potential dreamers.”
In the end, the characters are the genuine
reflection of a population. The power of McCay’s
work is that it analyses perfectly the society of
growing America in the beginning of the 20th
century, with its successes and vices, as Apos-
tolides says:
“The adventures of Little Nemo show the dif-
ferent stages an American child has to go through
to become an adult. Each stage is a level finishing
with a trial. When he succeeds, Nemo can reach
the next level. The comics itself can be read as
an initiation of a young boy to adulthood. If Little
Nemo doesn’t really succeed as he interiorizes the
negative dimension – constantly transferred on
the secondary characters, like Flip or Jungle Imp
– at least he will make a place to evil. This compro-
mise gives him the opportunity to leave aside his
childish behaviour. It is the growing importance
of Flip which makes Nemo accept the world’s am-
biguity. However, this only happens to boys. The
princess in Slumberland never meets the nega-
tive version of herself. She remains a dream girl,
well-dressed and conformist. She represents the
feminine ideal of this time’s American bourgeoi-
sie. As if the world of Nemo had to be built on the
ignorance and repression of the feminine part it
includes.”
So many significations are a heavy burden for
such a little boy. Nemo weighs on his shoulders
the turn of the century in a country full of capital-
ist promises. Nemo, who is “no one”, tries to find
his path in a country where the identity is still to
be defined. “Little Nemo is the reflection of the
values of its time”, Jean-Marie Apostolides says.
Behind child adventures, characters relation-
ships and colourful plates, Winsor McCay built a
whole system of connections, which opened the
way to animation. His American destiny could
be defined as halfway between a Rockefeller and
a Disney. In the America of 1905, he experienced
the road to success and its consequences, when
his comics were so popular that he had to abandon
his dreams of animation. Indeed, press publisher
William Hearst, who was McCay’s big boss, and a
jealous man, demanded him to forget all his com-
mitments outside of his own publications. It is
difficult not to think that, with the addition of Mc-
Cay’s tremendous talent, the world of animation
would probably be very different today…
“Slumberland is the American dream, more
than the dream of a delicate and melancholic
child – or, more accurately: it is the unexpected
encounter between the main character’s melan-
choly and the gigantism of a nation, overlooking
a huge theme park”, Apostolides says. While the
buildings grow, Nemo never stops being afraid of
the heights, hoping that all this, eventually, is just