Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays! [Hardcover]

Winsor McCay (Author), Peter Maresca (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0976888505 | ISBN-13: 978-0976888505 | Publication Date: September 1, 2005

"Likely the most spectacular book about comics ever" (LA TIMES) "....the finest." (TIME). The first edition of this book sold out in the first three months and is now out of print. The improved second printing is available NOW. Celebrate the 100th birthday of Winsor McCay's masterpiece with this FULL ORIGNAL SIZE, 120-page hardbound volume. It features Nemo's best from 1905-1910, all printed in the actual newspaper-page size, 16 x 21 inches. It was the greatest comic strip of its day, perhaps the greatest of all time, acclaimed the world over for its artistic majesty, unbounded imagination, and ground-breaking techniques that helped define a new art form. But since its debut 100 years ago, it has been all but impossible to view these masterpieces in their original size and colors. LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND can now be seen as creator Winsor McCay intended; 110 digitally-restored, full-size prints presented in incredible detail displaying the superb draftsmanship and unique comic style of the prolific McCay. This magnificent volume has become the most highly praised book of its kind. From a testimonial by writer and artist ART SPIEGELMAN: ". . . this heartbreakingly beautiful book is the reinvention of Winsor McCay - as if he was being published for the first time. Only better. " Famed graphic novelist CHRIS WARE calls "Splendid Sundays" "A wonderful thing. . . it's 'the book of the year.'" Writer NEIL GAIMAN says, "It is every bit as gorgeous as inspiring and as necessary as I had hoped." And from "Simpsons" creator MATT GROENING, "It's just amazing!"

Product Details

• Hardcover: 120 pages
• Publisher: Sunday Press Books (September 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0976888505
• ISBN-13: 978-0976888505
• Product Dimensions: 21 x 16.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #184,149 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So Many Splendid Delights, October 7, 2005

By 

Gilbert Klein (Chula Vista, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays! (Hardcover)

This book is the one. I was made aware of Winsor McKay's Little Nemo in the late 1970's, and have been a fan ever since. I've been amazed at how far ahead of the curve McKay was, and how much of an influence he was on so much art so much after his demise.

The adventures of Little Nemo were wonderful- by that I mean full of wonder. The colors were bold- way bolder for his day than anyone else. The panels blew off the limitations of convention as McKay left the restrictions of flat panels behind, letting the story demand its own, unique and innovative visual perspectives. Uh-oh- I'm sounding like an academic here, and I'm not. I'm a Little Nemo enthusiast and I'll let the experts explain in laborious detail what I cannot.

What I can explain is that Nemo was a startling experiment in his time, and if you want a definitive book that will allow you access to his adventures in Slumberland, then this is the one. If you want a more comprehensive overview, I guess Canemaker is your man. Canemaker's is a great book, too, and has the biographical details. This book has enough text for you to understand the strip in the context of its time, but lets the art speak for itself. This is the best book I've ever seen for the sheer joy of Little Nemo.

This is the only book that reproduces the comics in full size, and the editor swears that he has taken all the necessary pains to get the colors right. I will take his word for it, as I have only seen Nemo in other books and in preserved strips of the day, and who knows what the original colors were? Mr. Maresca has sworn that he took the time to get the colors right, and they are fantastic. And seeing it in its original size is a revelation. Nemo was magical, the Harry Potter of his day.

I have collected Nemo books and emphemera, and this is the one that is the most...exciting. Another bonus for me is that it has strips that I've never seen before. And the strips are reproduced in sequence when sequence is important, so a story can play out over several weekly installments. This is a big, oversized delight, and if you can't enjoy Nemo, you can't enjoy Shrek or The Incredibles. Says me.

42 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review from The Palm Beach Post, December 3, 2005

By 

Michael C. Browning (Palm Beach Gardens, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays! (Hardcover)

Beautiful dreamer: Winsor McCay's 'Little Nemo in Slumberland'
By Michael Browning
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 02, 2005
Winsor McCay dreamed in rainbows, rainbows almost measurelessly
large and lovely, shapes outswept in perfect perspective across
spacious pages of newsprint in a Sunday comic strip that is still
regarded as a sustained pinnacle of fantastic design and
imagination: Little Nemo in Slumberland.
He did it a hundred years ago, from 1905 to 1912, before TV, almost
before movies, when the comic strip itself was only eight years old,
and was regarded as just a gag and a novelty. He worked modestly and
dutifully all his life, drawing, drawing, drawing, riding the El
train from Sheepshead Bay to Manhattan every day, laboring in a
shabby office, always wearing his hat, even indoors, even while
working.
He was silently working wonders. Practically plotless as a dream
itself, Little Nemo is today regarded as the most beautiful work of
graphic art ever to appear in a newspaper.
The mechanics of it were simple. It would begin with a fanciful
frame, exquisitely drawn. Then McCay would go to town, building the
fancy to impossible heights, ever-more-marvelous reaches of visual
imagery, until at last the whole thing collapses and, in a tiny
frame at the lower right-hand corner, Little Nemo wakes up and
realizes it was all a dream.
It was visually astounding. It still is. Yet people wrapped fish in
McCay's masterpieces; they lit stoves with his pages. Little Nemo
was never much appreciated at the time it appeared, though today
original printed pages go for $30,000 or more.
Now, thanks to an extraordinary new book, it is possible to
appreciate what McCay had in mind, what he wrought. A selection of
the best of his work, actual size, has come out at last. Nemo hasn't
looked this glorious in a hundred years.
Peter Maresca, a former Apple computer designer who idolizes McCay,
has published at his own expense a huge handsome book, Little Nemo
in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!, which costs $120.
Done to honor McCay on the centenary of Little Nemo's first
appearance in print, the mega-volume measures 21 inches by 16 inches
and weighs more than 8 pounds. It was printed in Malaysia, on paper
laboriously sought out from Japan. It is so big it had to be
hand-bound. It exceeded the capacity of commercial bindery machines.

It reproduces faithfully, and in their original size, McCay's
astounding visions in color and reproduces them "down to the last
pixel," the publisher says.
"This shows you the insanity of my mind," Maresca said. "I wanted to
get the exact look of the newsprint. I didn't want pristine white
borders, and I didn't want the yellowed Scotch-taped effect. So we
took five background pages and blended them to get the right visual
texture, the grays and greens that real newsprint has, and then we
had to blow it up twice to get the exact grain. I wanted a very
authentic background."

Even after a century, the splendor of McCay's work has the power to
take your breath away. His huge, columned, sapphire-domed,
night-clad cityscapes, his fantastic beasts, sparkling ice-caves,
outsized butterflies, tremendous fireworks, dizzying perspectives,
his giants, his gems, his multicolored mushrooms and airships and
skyscrapers and elephants -- all these were outpoured weekly in a
tremendous, wide-irised, full-spectrum rush of perfect draftsmanship
that still exceeds the special effects in most movies today.
"He anticipates the wide screen," Maresca said. "He loved the
theater. He captures a lot of the exploding technology of his time.
He was working when the Wright brothers invented the airplane, when
the New York subway system was being built."
Nowadays Nemo is revered by illustrators like Maurice Sendak, whose
magic island in Where the Wild Things Are owes a debt to McCay's
Slumberland. He also influenced Bill Watterson, whose Calvin and
Hobbes also has a small boy who dreams wild dreams.
At the time, though, it was just one more comic strip in a host of
high-quality offerings being put out daily by furiously warring New
York newspapers. It was never syndicated. It played only in New
York.
"It never was all that popular," said Mickey Finn cartoonist Morris
Weiss, 90, of West Palm Beach, who met McCay in New York in 1934,
the year before the artist died. "It never really took off. It was
too whimsical."
Weiss was scarcely 20, McCay was nearly 68 when the two met. McCay
died shortly afterward, in July 1935.
"He was a slight man, very quiet. He always wore his hat while
working," Weiss remembered. "He didn't have a big, palatial office.
"He was very nice to me. He gave me an original of one of his
political cartoons. If you look at it, it's incredibly detailed. You
look at something like that up close and you think: 'Wow, the
effort! The work!' But if you're a cartoonist, that's what you do.
It isn't work. You are completely into it, and you do it."
McCay was born Sept. 27, 1867, in Spring Lake, Mich. He was the son
of an indulgent merchant-father who early recognized his talent.
"I never saw a tramway or an electric light before the age of 15,"
McCay said later. "But I loved to draw."
An art professor named John Goodeson taught McCay the power of
perspective. His lessons would result in some of the most dazzling
drawings in newspaper history. Using perspective, McCay was able to
suggest limitless distance in the space of a few inches.
The young man went to Detroit and became a quick-sketch artist in a
local "Dime Museum," a sort of vaudeville fun-house. He enjoyed the
applause and for the rest of his life would seek fame and public
approval that always seemed to elude him by a hair's breadth.
At one point McCay was doing three separate comic strips a week as
well as appearing in a nightly vaudeville show, where the audience
would challenge him to draw anything in a few seconds. He would. He
was a slave to his pencil.
He went to Chicago in 1889, Cincinnati in 1891 and New York in 1903.
There he would work at a pace so prodigious, turning out drawings so
prolifically, that their sheer volume is still staggering. They were
all done from scratch: No celluloid overlays, no Adobe Photoshop.
Just ink.

He began with strips titled The Jungle Imps, Mr. Goodenough,
Sister's Little Sister's Beau and The Phurious Phinish of Phoolish
Philip's Phunny Phrolics. McCay finally arrived with Little Sammy
Sneeze, a running gag strip that built up to a huge climax in which
a child would sneeze and blow everything and everyone away.
He struck a vein in 1904 with Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, which
presages Little Nemo and which purists still consider his cleverest
work. Every strip begins with an ordinary situation, which gradually
gets warped, magnified, pushed and shoved out of all recognition. In
the last frame, the hapless dreamer awakens and swears never to eat
Welsh rarebit (a toasted cheese sandwich) again.
The crazy dream, followed by the rude awakening, became the pattern
for Little Nemo In Slumberland, McCay's masterpiece, which debuted
on Oct. 15, 1905.
The first strip began with Nemo flying through the air in a
snowstorm, meeting strange winged animals including a kangaroo. The
very second episode was one of McCay's masterpieces, reproduced in
the new book: A forest of multicolored mushrooms whose tall stalks
break at last and whose caps fall in a soft avalanche. The third
episode had Nemo surrounded by storks on impossibly tall, glassy
legs that gradually become entangled chaotically.
On it went, getting more and more magnificent. The modest little... Read more ›

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing - wish there was more, October 19, 2005

By 

Nemo Fan (Brooklyn) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays! (Hardcover)

I had read about the size of this book, but I was truly surprised by just how large it was in my hands. It's essentially the size of entire front page of a paper like the New York Times (length-wise and width-wise). It really has to be seen (or held) to be believed. Aside from being difficult to carry on the subway and having difficulty figuring out where to put it on my shelf, the size is much appreciated.

As for the inside, the images have been reproduced and cleaned-up with such loving care, it is truly amazing. While there is little information on the life of Winsor McCay, other books out there have thoroughly discussed it (the Canemaker McCay book with Sendak introduction is worth getting for those interested). Around 100 of Maresca's favourites have been chosen to represent Nemo, some of them being the most complex of McCay's Little Nemo series.

My only regret is that there is not more. The editor has indicated that he will not release another volume, but I wish he would reconsider. A few years back, Fantagraphics released six books of all of Little Nemo's exploits, but those books, while nicely done, reproduce Nemo in smaller format, and they have long since gone out of print (as will this book soon I'm sure). Further, as Maresca chose 100 of the best pages, what little continuity exists in Little Nemo is somewhat lost. Granted, each Sunday's adventure was often independent of the previous Sunday's, but not always.

Regardless, Maresca has done an incredible job and should be commended for helping preserve some of the most incredible work by an underappreciated American artist. Surprisingly, Maresca could not get a publisher to take on this project, such that it was self-published. Hopefully this edition will do well, and there will be more to come either from Maresca or a publisher who realizes that a full-sized complete reproduction of McCay's work would be a worthwhile and profitable task to undertake.