Customer Reviews

Little Nemo in Slumberland: Many More Splendid Sundays, Volume 2

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If you bought the previous "Nemo" collection from Sunday Press, you know it was a whopper. And weren't all the "Nemo" pages worthy of a giant-sized book included in that volume? This book doesn't have a parade of sequences to match Nemo's journey to Slumberland, Befuddle Hall, nor the Flight to Mars, but you'd be hard-pressed to find another book that had 120 pages as fanciful and beautiful as those in this follow-up volume.

The terrific sequences weren't all swallowed by the first volume. "Many More Splendid Sundays" includes the Ice Palace, the Pirate Abduction, and the Airship Tour continuities, as well as representative selections from the "In the Land of Wonderful Dreams" and the second "Slumberland" series. There's also the very last "Wonderful Dreams" page from July 26, 1914, that eluded the diligent editors of the Remco and Checker "Nemo" collections, so if you're a Winsor McCay completist, this book is a must.

It's a must anyway, because try as they may, the smaller-proportioned collections just can't do justice to the magnitude of McCay's art. True, the storylines grew weary as the years went on; the strip was never the same after Nemo changed from wide-eyed adventurer to the man-child in charge. But when you see even the later strips in their true dimensions, when the draftsmanship and colors unfurl and work their magic, these pages become a circus of visual wonders. Even the final round of "Slumberland" strips have the ability to captivate.

In addition to the "lost" finale to "Wonderful Dreams," there are also samplings of McCay's other dream-themed strips, as well as a "Gertie the Dinosaur" flipbook (do-it-yourself) insert, and editorial contributions from Jeffrey Stanton, Brian Walker, and Ron Goulart, among others. This book is a treasure-trove companion to the previous "Splendid Sundays" volume. The only heartache it will give you is in finding a place big enough to store it.

This book is a treasure to any Little Nemo or comics fan in general. The volume is beautifully produced and expertly bound. The size of the pages is what every Nemo fan was wishing for without knowing it. Highly recommended.