Word: nemo
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...clear glass of hindsight, we see that the elite should have embraced the very first significant comics artist. That was McCay, who, just 100 years and a month before the Los Angeles museum show opened, published his first full-color page of Little Nemo in Slumberland in the New York Herald. Here was a popular art at its onset and apogee: not a primitive Lascaux cave painting but a Sunday-supplement Hieronymus Bosch - a glorious other-world of dreamscapes as phantasmagorical as they were funny...
...Each adventure began with the boy Nemo in his hallucinogenic nightworld, provided some vision or threat, and ended with him waking up startled in bed at home. McCay must have taken inspiration from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the publishing sensation of the early 1900s. Nemo is quite like Dorothy Gale, less invigorated than intimidated by this fantastic world, and usually wanting to get back home. ("I don't like this one little tiny bit," he says, "not one tiny weeney...
...Certainly the dream-boy was welcome in Slumberland, where King Morpheus and his princess daughter are most obliging, and where Nemo befriends the sassy Flip and a gibberish-speaking cannibal, the Imp. Often, though, the magic turned to menace, as when a tuba's tubing grows longer and more serpentine with every note puffed on it; or when Nemo, now in an urban setting, is pursued by apartment building on long metallic legs; or when he, Flip and Imp get lost in overgrown weeds - the eyebrow of Nemo's grandfather. In a strip that ran on New Year...
...McCay's ingenuity splashed from content to form and back again. Each huge page could be broken up into six horizontal strips or five vertical ones (showing an elephant getting bigger and scarier as it approaches). The panels might be in wavy shapes, when Nemo, Flip and Imp land in Befuddle Hall and their bodies elasticize into funhouse-mirror images. Or there'd be a large round central image, like the one for Thanksgiving 1905, in which a giant turkey - a kind of poultry Godzilla - uproots Nemo's house with its beak. Thanksgiving two years later expanded upon the dinner...
...McCay did some marketing of the Nemo brand (sandals) and in 1908 put the boy on Broadway, in a spectacle with music by Victor Herbert. But the strip didn't achieve great popularity; it was not syndicated nationally, running only in the New York Herald, then in the New York American. Decades would pass before a new generation of connoisseurs saw the art in Little Nemo. (Original pages can sell for $30,000 today.) The fish with the same name in the 2003 Pixar film is surely a tribute to McCay's pioneering lushness of imagination and precision of design...