Writers/Artists: Various
Publisher: Locust Moon Press
Release Date: December 3, 2014
Nobody understood the compromise between dreams and reality more than cartoonist Winsor McCay. After launching the revered Little Nemo in Slumberland newspaper strip in 1905, McCay found himself bound to a contract under the Hearst Corporation that relegated his work to editorial illustrations. Much like his most famous creation — the titular boy who ventured nightly through his endless subconscious — the creator awoke to a sobering reality full of chastising adults and disappointment. Unlike his creation, McKay never returned to the dreamscape that Nemo perpetually inhabited.
Eighty eight years after its last strip was published, Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream resurrects McCay’s vision with the help of over 120 of the comic book industry’s most accomplished voices. The result is undeniably magical. Each artist contributes a single-sheet comic, though a few run for three or four pages. And what pages they are. This book defines epic in both scope and size, its dimensions inflated to a huge 16” x 21”. Every line and detail assumes a new degree of lucidity, allowing the creators to choreograph complex, winding panel sequences that lead the eye through a labyrinth of surreal exploits and design choices otherwise implausible.
If form is function, then Dream Another Dream is big in every way.
The roster of contributors stretches through the expanse of the medium, uniting big-two illustrators like John Cassaday and J.H. Williams III with indie pioneers like Dean Haspiel and Peter Bagge. As McCay channeled his own personal psychology into his work (R. Sikoryak’s contribution stars Freud narrating his manifesto — a fitting hallmark of the early 1900s), the artists project their own dreams, passions and fears. On the more whimsical side of this equation, many of the creators inject their own characters into the Nemo format. Bagge’s Buddy, Stephen Bissette’s Tyrant and Jill Thompson’s Scary Godmother all make cameos, most tumbling through numbered panels before arriving at the defining wake-up panel that ended each of Nemo’s original adventures.
