Winsor McCay: Little Nemo

First off, I was very excited to finally have an opportunity to read the Little Nemo comics since I grew up watching the movie adaptation.

This comic is beautiful with it's well designed panels, flowing visual story, and of course McCay's imaginative people, places and scenarios. McCay uses a simple uniform distant side view throughout the comic, some might consider this boring and not "dynamic" enough by todays standards of comics but I it's perfect to show the animation-like progression from Nemo's bed through Slumberland and right back to his bed with a lot of forward momentum. I think this uniform view also allowed McCay to worry less about camera placement and focus more on the story and visuals.

McCay seems to have had a really good ability to make older readers remember what it feels like to be a kid, showing Nemo's initial curiosity and mischievousness until something goes wrong and he begins calling for his mom to save him.

One thing that I think takes away from the comic some is the text, much of it doesn't seem to have been thought out as much as the art and appears to have been thrown in at the last minute. Especially in the early issues of the comic, captions are crammed in the gutters and the sentences don't stop in each panel to allow the reader to pause and look at the pictures and dialog but run on from panel to panel. This slows down the flow since both the images and the captions move continuously parallel from one another, causing the reader to either read all the way through one at a time or consciously force them self to  stop at each panel to look at the image and dialog then read the corresponding caption. Even though speech bubbles remained sloppy, the captions progressively cleaned up through the issues until the disappeared, which I'm guessing is because McCay realized his images with a little dialog was enough to tell the story.

For me, even though I wasn't exposed to the Nemo comics until I was older, I think they still had an effect on my early creative development since I watched the animated movie at a young age. I can see elements of Nemo come through in my art, the overall common theme of my work being a shining positive light (the protagonist) in dream-like mysterious situations with a dark eery vibe.