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Rating: "If you can dream it, you can do it." Walt Disney
I can hardly imagine what went through the minds of those kids who, on October 15, 1905, along with the New York American newspaper, read the first astonishing panels of this extraordinary comic strip by Winsor McCay (1871-1934). “Little Nemo in Slumberland” was undoubtedly a bolt from the blue among that generation of American kids accustomed to the banal and precious rhyming stories of the time.
Little Nemo carved out a niche and marked the end of one world and the start of modern youth literature. An apotheosis of unprecedented inventions and innovations (both graphic and narrative), comparable to the transition from silent movies to sound and color simultaneously. Nothing so daring and innovative had ever been proposed before. No comic strip artist (a term almost disdainful at the time) had ever gone so far.
The protagonist of the comic strip is little Nemo, a 7/8-year-old child belonging to the American middle class who every night falls asleep in his room and dreams of going to the Land of Slumberland: a wonderful place that exists only in his mind.
Every sleep is a part of the journey, and every dream is an improbable, absurd, and visionary adventure. And inevitably, every morning, he wakes up more or less shaken by the beautiful and strange adventures experienced during the night.
While the format is simple in itself, the true innovation occurs between dozing and waking up.
In the dreamlike part, adventures happen, with encounters and numerous perils that lead the boy to meet unlikely dragons, walk in completely inverted worlds, meet people living as if in distorting mirrors, walk in cities submerged by water, and continuously chase an impossible goal since Slumberland (most likely) does not even exist.
But, as they say: the journey matters more than the destination.
There is indeed a dual level of interpretation in these splendidly colored panels, meticulously drawn by McCay's skillful hand.
Looking more attentively at the visionary and bizarre stories of this little boy, one can read real acts of accusation against the political and social institutions of that contemporary world (we are still in the early 1900s!). McCay criticizes racism and racial segregation on several occasions, the absurd bureaucracy of state apparatuses, the failure of a certain economic system solely based on profit (truly ahead of its time!), the conformity to imposed behavioral and aesthetic models, and many more.
But beyond these noble intentions, the true delight of this comic strip lies in the delicate and refined ornamental and graphical richness of the drawings of these panels, enjoyable only in extra-large format: a feast for the eyes and an orgy of details drawn with an almost maniacal and obsessive care that makes this comic strip an undisputed masterpiece of the global comic strip world.
The aesthetic and visual inventions of these pages (see here), as well as the proposed script innovations, will be the basis and source of inspiration for dozens of authors, directors, and writers who will follow. Just to mention our Federico Fellini (a declared fan of the character), Terry Gilliam, Italo Calvino, Stefano Benni, and so on.
A comic strip one never gets tired of rereading because with each reading, new narrative levels and graphic details are discovered that were missed the previous time.
Reading Little Nemo is like diving into the invented world of dreams, and indeed, as luck would have it, you never want to leave it, unlike the modern games of our children (PSP, DS Lite, and the like) which are a source of stress and offer everything pre-packaged without the slightest room for interpretation and decoding to the game user.
But that's another story: a long-standing and worn-out debate between me and the coming generation... practically a lost battle! :-)
Comic strip unmissable.
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