The Comic Strip

I've never really been a fan of “comic strips” when I was a kid because they just weren't complex enough to read 1 at a time in the sunday paper.  They do have a place in my mind however, because they eventually lead to the creation of comicbooks and graphic novels which I do enjoy quite a bit.  But, we'll get into comicbooks next class, so for now lets discuss some comic strips.

I'd never been exposed to any of Winsor McCay's work until coming to Ringling, but I really do have an appreciation of his work as a whole.  I read the first few years of production on Little Nemo: In Slumberland.  McCay sets each strip up by showing Nemo getting “awoken” in this new world but it's usually pretty normal for a few panels until he's fully immersed into the Slumberland.  I think this was intentionally done as to gradually move the reader into the fantastic worlds that McCay illustrates in each strip.  Almost every strip I read however ends in Nemo becoming terrified and either falling out of bed or yelling for his mother or father to help him.  The comic strip about Nemo going to Santa's workshop and being able to eat all the candy he wanted ended in a more cheerful way with Nemo actually wanting to go back to Slumberland.  This made me realize that I wanted to see a little more variation in how each story ended and I didn't want all of his experiences to be bad ones.

During class we read some of McCay's earlier strips in the form of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, which is an obvious interlude into Little Nemo, as each odd unrelated dream ends in the dreamer realizing they had the dream because of something they ate the night before.  The illustration style is also derived from his earlier work with an almost animation quality to the characters, but Little Nemo has a much more diverse and vivid world for the characters to explore.  Dream of the Rarebit Fiend is also far more adult in content, most strips resulting in some sort of violence; Nemo also does this, but not to the same degree and it has a lighter approach.  One thing that bothered me about Nemo, was that McCay often would put a caption at the bottom of each box telling the reader exactly what was happening in the panel and not only do I think it slowed the experience down but, it was completely unnecessary in most cases because is little dialogue and excellent illustrations already do the job.

I also read quite a bit of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon.  I really got into this one, the illustration is superb in every panel reminding me a lot of the golden age of illustration pen and ink work and kind of a prelude to what you think of as a comicbook style use of ink.  I think what drew me into Flash Gordon is that even though it is a comic strip it follows an interesting story for an entire arc, which leads me to believe that it's one of the comic strips that sort of launched the comicbook format, with longer more well written stories and dialogue.

Oddly enough, after hearing about Little Nemo in Slumberland for the first time when I came to Ringling, it brought back memories of one of my favorite games that I played on the NES when I was around 4-5 called “Little Nemo the Dream Master”.  I thought this would be interesting to some people, it was developed by Capcom, but I don't think it's very well known...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0b/Littlenemocover.png