alexandraerin

Cartoonist Winsor McCay's best known creation is Little Nemo in Slumberland, also known as In The Land of Wonderful Dreams. Most people alive today who have encountered Little Nemo did so through an animated adaptation or the NES game that reached U.S. shores ahead of it. That's how I first became aware of the character, but it happens that Little Nemo is far older than that... old enough that the entire original run of comic strips is in the public domain.

Though they broke from the established slapstick dynamic of strips that were popular at the time, the Nemo comics were a fairly formulaic affair. Within that formula, though, any number of wonders were depicted.

To quote Wikipedia:

Although a comic strip, it was far from a simple children's fantasy; it was often dark, surreal, threatening, and even violent. The strip related the dreams of a little boy: Nemo (meaning "nobody" in Latin), the hero. The last panel in each strip was always one of Nemo waking up, usually in or near his bed, and often being scolded (or comforted) by one of the grownups of the household after crying out in his sleep and waking them. In the earliest strips, the dream event that woke him up would always be some mishap or disaster that seemed about to lead to serious injury or death, such as being crushed by giant mushrooms, being turned into a monkey, falling from a bridge being held up by "slaves", or gaining 90 years in age. The adventures leading to these disasters all had a common purpose: to get to Slumberland, where he had been summoned by King Morpheus, to be the "playmate" of his daughter, the Princess.

Sometime during early 1906, Nemo did indeed reach the gates of Slumberland, but had to go through about four months of troubles to reach the Princess. His problem was that he kept being awakened by Flip, who wore a hat with "Wake Up" written on it. One sight of Flip's hat was enough to take Nemo back to the land of the living during these early days. Although at first an enemy, Flip went on to become one of the recurring heroes. The others included: Dr. Pill, The Imp, the Candy Kid and Santa Claus as well as the Princess and King Morpheus.

Even more bizarre and obscure than Little Nemo in Slumberland, though, was the comic strip that preceded it. It seems Nemo was a spin-off of an earlier McCay project about a series of anonymous dreaming adults who suffer similarly bizarre (if often more pedestrian) nightmares and, upon awakening in the last panel, invariably blame the experience on having eaten a toasted cheese dish, mince pie, or mince pie with cheese before retiring.

The strip is called "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend", and if you don't think I'm pulling your leg you probably aren't reading closely enough.

...

But I'm not.

( Read on... )