LITTLE NEMO AND ITS INFLUENCE - GUEST POST BY BARRY PEARL...

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The Mighty (though Bashful) BARRY PEARL has done it again.  Here's his latest guest post for Crivens!, written specially for the purpose of giving you all a break from my woeful wafflings.  (He's got your well-being at heart, you see.)  All the images were supplied by Barry himself, and it takes a lot of time to dig out the relevant books and scan them.  So be sure and show your appreciation (if you'd be so kind) by leaving a comment after you've read the results of all his hard work.

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I never claim to be a comic book historian; I like to be considered a “discoverer.” There is so much in this medium to be discovered.  In the late 1970s I “discovered” one of the greatest strips of all time, “Little Nemo in Slumberland”.  Created during the first decade of the 20th century, Zenas Winsor McCay drew Sunday strips like no other.  They are just unbelievably beautiful and imaginative.

If you can, see these strips (above and at foot of post) in a larger size.  (Click to enlarge, then click again for optimum size.)  I have put up some of the books they are contained in.  I love the Taschen book and the Nostalgia Press, along with the Sunday Press books.

In his Taschen intro, Alexander Braun shows the connection of this strip to Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby (and even Bill Gaines).  I've put up that page from Taschen as I thought that part would be fun to read.  I also put up scans from the Kirby book and  the Ditko story that he refers to.

Alexander Braun: By the early 1950s, Sigmund Freud's teachings on psycho-analysis had arrived at the center of society, more so in the United States than in Europe.  The idea of depicting the analysis of dreams in the form of a comic practically seemed unavoidable especially after the pictorial creations of the Surrealists: Dali’s motifs, in particular, enjoyed a great deal of popularity.  To do so, it no longer had to be in the same tradition as McCay's work.  Rather, illustrators sought to come close to medical plausibility.  They wanted to tell "true" stories from the unconscious mind and to decode these for their audience.

In 1952, the studio of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, together with their closest colleagues, Mort Meskin and Bill Draut launched the strip The Strange World of Your Dreams for Prize Publications.  Mort Meskin, in particular, was a driving force behind the project.  He had read Freud's writings, had been a patient in a sanatorium, and practiced a form of ther­apy developed by the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who had fled from the National Socialists in 1939 and emigrated to New York, where he then continued his work.  As dream experts, the team surrounding Jack Kirby introduced the character Richard Temple, to whose New York address readers could send their dreams to be analyzed.  If a dream was chosen to he adapted into a comic story, the submitter would receive $25.  Whether the money was ever actu­ally paid out, and whether there really was a Richard Temple, has never been determined, but seems rather doubtful.

It soon became clear that the comic book series that appealed to an adult readership would not find enough readers.  Alter just four issues, the experi­ment was brought to an end in 1953.  The target audi­ence had simply been too imprecisely defined. With the cover artwork, the creators flirted with the style of the extremely successful horror comic books of the time, but they could not and did not want to be as explicit.  Aside from this, they had had women readers in mind while launching this topic, but women preferred the romantic comic books that had been launched by the Simon/Kirby studio itself beginning in 1947.

(After) the 1954 passage of the Comics Code… EC Comics, in particular, tried to develop new topic areas for comics,  Thus the publisher William Gaines (1922-1992), who had experience with therapy him­self, made an attempt with the comic book series Psychoanalysis in 1955.  This endeavour to make the decryption of dreams useful for comics did not find a large enough audience either and was also cancelled after only four issues.

It is likely that, through his frequent change in employers, Robert McCay (Winsor's son) also met Steve Ditko who, in terms of age, could have been his son.  After graduating from art school, Ditko first worked in Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's studio beginning in 1953, then for Charlton Comics, and finally for Atlas Comics, the precursor to Marvel Comics, where he developed The Amazing Spider-Man with Stan Lee beginning in 1962.  A very remarkable story for the 26^th issue of Tales to Astonish dates back to December 1961 - five months be­fore Robert McCay's death.  A man dreams that he floats out of his bed and his window.  Startled  he awakes only to discover that, once again, he begins to float -yet again trapped in a dream, and so on.  Can we be sure that we wake in reality and not just in another dream?  This kind of fantasy exposition that is not con­cerned with the cause and decoding of the dream but carries the absurdity of dreams to its own sake is in keeping with the spirit of Winsor McCay.