Bukatman, Scott. The Poetics of Slumberland : Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit. University of California Press, 2012. EBSCOhost.

Winsor McCay's comic trip Little Nemo in Slumberland  ran from 1905 to 1914 as a full-page fantasia of brilliant colours and enchanting metamorphoses. The strip's protag, the boy Nemo, leaves the mundane world of reality to sojourn in a land of wonderful dreams, but McCay's inovative spatiotemporal manipulations also remake the world of the reader, who makes an analogous voyage-albeit a motionless one: drawn into the world of the comics page, with its wondrous transformations and morphing spaces.
..an aesthetic space primarily defined through the artists' innovations, an animated space that opens out to embrace the imaginative sensibility of the reader who is never farther than an arm's length from this other realm, a space of play and plasmatic possibility in which the stable site of reading or viewing yields to an onslaught of imaginative fantasy; it is an impermanent space. A comic like Little Nemo served as a brief interlude from the world presented in the World. ....

An important aspect... is that it's temporary. You wake up

Fleeting refuge from the.. real
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Comics and cartoons, though, are the archetypes - media that, nearly from their inception, set about overturning established orders and their hierachies, frequently pausing to meditate on their own posibilites.
...comic: william hogarth's serial paintings





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'..comics page a part of ..newpaper, cartoons..precede feature films. //slapstick part of both

..comics developed as a storytelling form far more quickly than cartoons. ()




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CHAPTER 1




LNIS began...on Oct 15, 1905, in the pages of the Sunday comics suppliment of the New York Herald1




In this earliest incarnation speech balloons are used minimallt (); the narrative is conveyes by the running helpfully numbered) captions and the art. the page is masterfully constructed: six tiers, each with a pair of equally sized panels except for the first........




Several important and characteristic elements are at work in this, Nemo's debut. First, one might note that the dream (and the saga) begins not with Nemo but with Slumberland's kind, who charges Oomp with summoning Nemo. The dream begins then, outside Nemo's consciousness. The wide top panel provides a glimpse of Slumberland behind the king -we can make out.... . The ambiguity over whether this frame is a design or an architectural element is sustained by the position of the king, whoc leans casusally on, and spills slightly over, the bttom frame border. Thus

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through both his posture and his prescence in what is really the title panel, the king is as separate from the diagetic space as he is from nemo's dream.




In future srips, as McCy begins to open the page to more elaborate configurations of panels, that final panel will increasingly figure as an inset-the one immutible element in the strip-an intrusion into(or carved from) the space of the dream.







And there is, perhaps most spectacularly,the evocatoion of movement, which pervades this single page. One image in particular leaps out....

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muybridge's photography, Marey







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John Fell wrote "by posing the dimension of time on a visible linear continuum, comics offer something different from cinema. Even after the reader has proceeded from picture to picture, the panels continue to relate to one another on the page" 11

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These are methods that comics quickly adopt. Winsor McCay does something like it in the first LNIS, as the various multihued horses, kangaroos, and billy goats are arrayed along a single, elegantly undulating arc of movement that extends across each panel and from one panel to the next )this dialetic between wild kinesis and perfectly rendered stasis has it's analogue ni the overarching narrative of LN: the cosmic journeys across time and space counterbalanced by the insistent return to the bed from which no one has moved at all-..




Comics and cinema offer experiences of both temporal fracturing and temporal flow, but the comics reader has more control over time than the cinematic spectator, with the freedom to look back or peek ahead. Time in comics is represented as territory in space, and the experience of the flow of time can be very carefully regulated. This dialetic between the stasis of the individual image and the spatiotemporal movement of the sequence-a dialetic that relates to the diegesis but also to the experience of the reader-is what McCloud calls "the temporal map" and it is a conceptual fundament of the medium.13




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CHAPTER 2




Little Nemo was printed at full broadsheet size (about 20" by 14") and was designed to be engaged with at no more than arm’s length (and perhaps a child’sarm, at that). Generous selections of Little Nemo strips have recently been republished at their original size,and their restored scale packs a surprising wallop.14 One does not just read Little Nemo,or look at it; rather, one falls into it. is is, to a degree, simply a matter of size alone, aided in no small measure by the voluptuous coloring and decorative, ornamental richness. But it also has something to do with what McCay does with that enormous space.



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Nemo,the layout of the panels begins to mimic and mirror Nemo’s own phenomenological experience: the sinking bed and the downward path are echoed in the downward-reaching panels, while the collapsing forest finds its analogue in the col-lapsing space of the panels around the hapless boy. e geometry of the page has become more complex, as the eye moving across the panels (as in the first strip) now also finds itself pulled downward to accommodate the changing space through which Nemo moves. e strip has already moved beyond the more strictly chrono-photographic array of the previous week. McCay repeats this layout in the next episode, as Nemo tries to negotiate a chasm on a pair of stilts, only to encountersome very affectionate long-legged storkl ike birds that send him tumbling onto abed of cactus (and, of course, out of his actual bed). the bottom drops out of thepanels in a layout once again mimetic of the space around Nemo, and, in the tier below, the panels compress to replicate his entrapment



in my first chapter I analyzed, in some detail, the first episode ofLittle Nemo,inwhich Nemo is first summoned to Slumberland to meet its princess. Nemo’s bedis transformed into a magical horse named Somnus, and the journey resembles, inseveral ways, a phantasmagoric chronophotographic sequence. Two elements of the strip, however, went unmentioned: its impressive size, the expansiveness of the tabloid page lending itself wonderfully to the depiction of magical journeys far fromthe safety of one’s bed. And I neglected to mention that, despite the fantastic meta-morphoses and bold color shis, the strip is resolutely linear in its movement andplanar in its organization





It doesn’t take long, however, for McCay to move beyond the frontal, flat orien-tation that marks the first episode of Nemo (and the creations that preceded it)—it takes all of a week. In the two subsequent strips, Nemo again essays the journey to Slumberland: first through a forest of giant mushrooms,then across a deep chasm atop a pair of spindly stilts.23 Both strips are similarly laid out: the top tier is a sin-gle wide panel (with architectural elements dividing the space) set in Slumberland,with some discussion about summoning Nemo; the next tier is about the same height as the first and presents the king’s messenger encountering Nemo to prepare him for his voyage; and the final two tiers present the abortive journey itself. In theOctober 22, 1905, strip Nemo’s adventure begins with his bed sinking down into the floor as though on an elevator (the caption notes that “the usual arrangement was rapidly becoming disarranged”); the rest of the strip evokes a series of down-ward steps (Plate 12). In the third tier Nemo is told that he must navigate a path that winds through a forest of giant mushrooms, which he is forbidden to touch.As he proceeds down the path and into the forest, the panels stretch downward andthe vegetation increasingly towers above him. e bottom of each panel is lower than the last, continuing the downward drop of Nemo’s bed, and taking Nemo both down and into the forest. Sadly, and, it must be said, rather predictably, in the right-most panel of the third tier, Nemo does accidentally stumble into one of the monumental fungi, setting off, on the bottom tier of the strip, a cascade of falling mush-rooms that sends him fleeing (“Papa! I’m getting—Oh—squashed!”). In this final tier the panels become progressively shorter (squeezed by the elongated panels in the tier above), leading to the final, inevitable square in which the dyspeptic Nemosits up awake (“Didn’t Mama tell you not to eat that raisin cake?”).there is still a strong symmetry in this bottom part of the page, but organized diagonally rather than vertically and horizontally. Strong unity of color, characterized by the muted earthy tones of the mushrooms, gives the page a pleasingly deco-rative appearance, but there is a new sense of immersion. Here, in the second Little

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Nemo,the layout of the panels begins to mimic and mirror Nemo’s own phenom-enological experience: the sinking bed and the downward path are echoed in thedownward-reaching panels, while the collapsing forest finds its analogue in the col-lapsing space of the panels around the hapless boy. e geometry of the page hasbecome more complex, as the eye moving across the panels (as in the first strip)nowalso finds itselfpulled downward toaccommodatethechanging spacethroughwhich Nemo moves. e strip has already moved beyond the more strictly chrono-photographic array of the previous week. McCay repeats this layout in the nextepisode, as Nemo tries to negotiate a chasm on a pair of stilts, only to encountersome very affectionate long-legged storklike birds that send him tumbling onto abed of cactus (and, of course, out of his actual bed). e bottom drops out of thepanels in a layout once again mimetic of the space around Nemo, and, in the tierbelow, the panels compress to replicate his entrapment.ese strips significantly extend the sense of immersion and participation thatwas already present in the first episode ofLittle Nemo.ese are still wallpaperstrips—still very decorative and strongly patterned—but there are new, dynamicgeometries in play. Over the next few years of the strip, McCay will continue to ex-periment with these techniques. His progress is, to be sure, neither linear nor un-broken,butitissomewhatinexorable.estripofNovember12,1905,withNemo’sbed tossed in a tempest at sea, involves some sustained play with perspective anddepth—the bed is, for once, viewed frontally, although Nemo continues to occupythe middle ground of the scene. Others around the same time are organized aroundalarge,circular,centralimage:agiantturkeyinoneinstance,amostMélièsianmooninanother24—thesestripsaremoreovertlydecorativethanimmersive.Aroundmid-1906 things really start to happen consistently: McCay combines a hyperbole of de-tail with sustained play around perspective, panel sizes, and aspects of scale.25Athree-week series (beginning in May of 1906) involves Nemo changing size andcharging around Slumberland, but this series is not nearly as compelling as themonthlong sequence in late 1907 in which the gigantic figures of Nemo, Flip, andInky tower over the blocks of buildings in lower Manhattan (Plate 13)