Some of the Cool Stuff in Little Nemo

Little Nemo, by Winsor McCay, is an influential series of comics that helped cultivate the medium into what it is today. It’s dynamic use of color, panel arrangement, and story arc is among the most groundbreaking of the early Twentieth Century. McCay was a visionary who understood that some stories are best told through a graphic narrative.

I’ll ask you —What constitutes a great work of art or piece of literature? Is it a writer’s ability to tell a story that’s themes and ideas will always be contemporary, or an artist’s ability to combine flawless craft with brilliant ideas. I don’t know, and we can leave that to the professionals. What I do know is that Little Nemo certainly is great, (at least in my mind) here's why.

His artistic style is something to behold. I think, most notably, is the architecture he imagines in Slumberland and his vibrant use of color. This combination makes his world so vivid and real. When you combine this with his cartoony characters, you start to see first hand what Scott McCloud was talking about in, Understanding Comics. Creating a realized world and more cartoony characters helps put the reader into the characters shoes, making for a more absorbing narrative/story. I think Winsor McCay did this on a more subconscious level, but he executed it clearly, and that’s what matters.

Another thing that stood out in Winsor McCay’s, Little Nemo was the story’s persuading sense of flow. I attribute this to panel arrangement and dialog. (Winsor numbered his panels, which I found to be unnecessary, but after reading some other comics of around the same time I believe it was just a contemporary, stylistic addition.)  I am a total scrub, noobie-doobie when it comes to graphic narratives, which is why I’m invested in learning more about it, and I found the panels easy to read and I never felt interrupted or taken out of the narrative. The only time I was ever broken out of the narrative was on the very last panel when Nemo would wake up. (These were rewarding to read.)

There’s a lot we can extract from Little Nemo. This blog post takes a sampling of the stuff that McCay did right. We haven’t even looked at his overwhelming creativity and loveable characters. If you want something that doesn’t scratch the surface, take a look at Little Nemo. You can find it for free on the Internet. See you in Slumberland. 

Space/Time and Flow in Graphic Narratives.

Scott McCloud’s perspective on comics and seeing the world through comics is rather thought provoking. Not only does he shed light on understanding comics, but he does so in a way that makes sense for people like me, who are used to reading and understanding books, not comics.

In his books, Understanding Comics and Making Comics, Scott McCloud dropped some serious knowledge on his readers. He talked a lot about pattern recognition, East and West comics, conveying all five sense through the combined efforts of pictures/words, and of course, the relationship between time and space.

What I found most intriguing about his thoughts on comics was what he had to say about space and time. Creating this flow is difficult, and a lot of the overall success of the story depends on the seamlessness of flow. This relationship between space and time is more dramatic than a People Magazine article on Justin Bieber’s love life. Let me explain:

A lot of the relationship takes place from panel-to-panel and in the space between the panels, called “gutters.”  If the use of space is sloppy, then story can seem choppy and fragmented, or worse, the reader can get lost and their eyes will fly around the page with more reckless peril than a fart in a fan factory.

Pulling off successful use of time and space creates magic. Done correctly, a single panel can take upwards of 30 seconds, or an entire page can take just a few seconds. (Like when an artist wants to establish setting, so they show the reader multiply viewpoints of the same place. This is more common in Manga than in American comics.)

Words and art play a crucial role in creating time and space. McCloud suggests that if you want a reader to take more time on a single image, spend time drawing all 400 leaves of a tree. Create a visual treat, something that serves as more than just a backdrop to what is being said. Even though it’s just a moment in time, maybe a second or two, it can mean the difference between the reader reading the story and actually being there.

Now isn’t that something? Richness in detail creates something that’s visually understood as only taking up a few seconds! That’s pretty darn cool.

Conversely, if you have a wordier panel, or series of panels, they can help keep the story going, or get the point across that giant leaps of time have passed. (Something panel-to-panel wouldn’t be able to pull off alone.) For example, “10 years later...” or, “30 miles west…”   Or even just the conversation in panels help convey the message that the panel encompasses more than just a second or two.

There’s so much more that is discussed in Scott McClouds books, he does a great job at explaining what to keep an eye out for while you’re reading through a comic or graphic narrative. As someone who is a newbie at this medium, I found his books to be helpful in establishing a foothold  into the enticing world of comics.

The Wordless Narrative

Symbols connect us. Letters string together, creating words that go on to become sentences. However, even letterform symbols, like the English Alphabet, aren’t rudimentary. They are abstractions and thus take time to learn. A Picture as a symbol is a more innate way of communicating than a letterform. Think about the first cave drawings. They date back 40,000 years ago. What about the first written documents? A short 5,000 years ago, and that’s quite a gap.

The Arrival, by Shaun Tan is a graphic narrative that uses pictures to tell a story as opposed to words, or words and pictures. The Arrival can tell a story without using words because it speaks on behalf of emotions and ideas that are universal. In other words, it’s simple. I don’t mean dull or stupid, but simple. An astute reader can funnel down the message of the story into one sentence. “Man leaves home to create a better future for his family.”

The use of pictures-only is amplified by the fact that the man in the story can’t speak or understand the language, so the reader and protagonist are attached in that fundamental way, which is being wordless to progress.  We share his burden, and ours is trivial in comparison.

As an ad major, I have to think about telling stories with pictures all the time, especially for global brands, whose end user might not speak English. From experience, I think the core message always has to be incredibly strong and reach an emotional milestone. “Is it funny? Did I cry? Am I inspired to change myself?” Hitting emotions is the best way to tell wordless stories. Which goes back to what I was saying earlier about keeping it simple. (Here’s how you can test to see if an ad is good —Watch it with the sound turned off. If it still made you laugh, chances are it’s a simple, brilliant ad. This doesn’t always work, but it’s a good starting point.)

Keeping it simple is the way to go. Not everyone speaks English. Sometimes the best way to tell a story is emotionally, through pictures. As Doug Larson, American Cartoonist, once said, “If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.”