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