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.