Little
Nemo
in Slumberland:
So
Many Splendid Sundays
by Winsor McCay
Winsor
McCay’s masterpiece, Little Nemo in
Slumberland,
as it has never
been reproduced before. A
magnificent limited-edition
hardbound volume presenting the greatest Little
Nemo strips from
1905-1910, in FULL ORIGINAL NEWSPAPER SIZE -- an absolutely stunning
16" x 21" per strip -- for the first time ever since their original
publication 100 years ago! Don’t miss the chance to enhance your
library with this
essential piece of American cultural history. 120 pages,
$120, that's a mere dollar per classic, poster size, high-resolution
reproduction.
retail price - $120.00 copacetic price - out of stock
ordering info
We could go on and on, but
why listen to us when you
have these amazing testimonials:
But wait, before we hand
you over we have to tell you that the amazing second volume,
Little Nemo in
Slumberland - Many More Splendid Sundays is NOW
AVAILABLE!
Now, what the
world is
saying about
LITTLE NEMO
IN SLUMBERLAND - SO
MANY SPLENDID SUNDAYS:
It's
truly incredible. What can I say? In a single book you've more or less
rethought the whole "culture" of comic strip reprints, and now
everything else looks really tepid and mediocre by comparison. I'd
always thought I understood the importance of original scale to these
pages, but I guess I really didn't, and though I tend towards the
critical, there's not a single thing I'd want different in this book --
it's perfect through and through, from the conception to the page
selection to the essays to the reproduction to, particularly, the
design, which is standard-setting in its tastefulness and
sophistication, capturing the dignified excitement of McCay's art
without imposing a "modern" sensibility to it ... while at the same
time not trying to imitate his work directly, either. My compliments to
you and everyone who worked on it! Every time I look at it I get
inspired; really, this is a wonderful thing, and if you don't get the
grand recognition you deserve for it, then there is simply no justice
in the world. It's the "book of the year." This is an astounding thing
you've made, almost like you've invented a new way of seeing, or
something. Maybe you should patent it. . . you've really
contributed
more to the appreciation of comics with this than I think maybe you
were even hoping to ... it's like going back in time, or seeing a
landmark building cleaned and restored to the clarity of the day
it
was built .
--Chris Ware, writer, artist, editor, Jimmy
Corrigan, Walt and Skeezix, Acme Novelty Library
This beautifully done book is a work
of art in itself, and a gift to
all classic comic strip fans as well as to any art lover. A monument to
man's imagination, McCay's masterpiece, which never ceases to amaze me,
has never looked better. Kudos to Peter Maresca. May this be the first
of many!
--Patrick McDonnell, cartoonist, Mutts
I've
waited forever to see Little Nemo as it should be seen, and this makes
it possible. What a pleasure. What a treat! The sheer joy and
exuberance McCay must have felt doing this strip becomes evident in
this volume like never before. It's just amazing!
--Matt Groening, cartoonist, Life in Hell, The
Simpsons
Newsprint
tearsheets got NEMO through its
first 100
years. This stunning volume
should propel it well into the future.
--Garry Trudeau, cartoonist, writer,
Doonesbury
To
see this awesome labor of love and of insight into the creativity of
Winsor McCay is to know it has to become part of your library and your
life. Peter Maresca has wrought the definitive showcase of McCay's
Little Nemo
in this unsurpassable volume, a basic book of reference for
the ages. Its large, full color pages mirror the original newsprint
size of the classic graphic work, an inexhaustible poster display of
over a hundred of the most memorable pages and stories ever limned by
McCay, to share their wonder with you and your family and friends for
long ages ahead.
--Bill Blackbeard, writer, historian, The
Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, founder of The
San Francisco Academy of Comic Art
Congratulations
on a truly beautiful and creative showcase of one of America's great
works of art. You have done popular culture historians and McCay fans
everywhere a great favor by preserving this unique work in such a
sensitive and loving manner.
--John Canemaker, Professor/Director-Animation, NYU;
author, Winsor McCay - His Life and Times
Having
looked at it, the new Little
Nemo In Slumberland
book is every bit as
gorgeous as inspiring and as necessary as I had hoped. Yes, it is very
expensive, but it is also large enough that, with the addition of legs,
it would make a fine table, and, were you reading it on a boat and you
were shipwrecked, you could cling to it until you were washed up on
some deserted island somewhere, assuming that the desert island was
near enough that you got washed up before the pages got waterlogged.
And then you'd have something to read on your desert island, or even to
make a small house out of. Which makes it a real bargain.
--Neil Gaiman, writer, Neverwhere, Sandman
Peter's
book is such an incredible artifact ... just opening it is a new
experience! I've never seen a book of that size.. now imagine it being
filled by 110 giant pages of the most brilliant artwork ever produced
in the comic strip medium, printed with such care and expertise that it
offers a perfect facsimile of the original Herald Tribune material --
except for the fact that the vibrant and subtle hues of Ben Day colours
are now printed on strong, beautiful paper. So,
even if you thought you
knew Little Nemo
inside out, believe me, every page represents a
thrilling FIRST for the 21st century reader. Not only can you bask in
McCay's vibrant palette like never before and experience his immersive
compositions at exactly the intended scale, any page will also present
you with a dozen yet unrecognized subtleties in the way McCay chose to
draw part of one scene or let the color itself draw some
backgrounds,
playing on innumerable atmospheric and lighting effects... I can't even
begin to describe the myriad surprises that lie hidden in those pages.
Art Nouveau has always been an holistic concept where the artist
likes to focus on the minutest detail with the same intensity of
invention as he applies to the whole, and clearly McCay was very much
on that wavelength. For the first time after 100 hundred years, at
last, a perfect edition in book form lets the reader experience Little
Nemo's wonderland -- as if
had been
drawn yesterday.
--Thierry Smolderen, comics historian, writer, McCay
Some
things are worth waiting for. Sweetest of all this week’s treasures,
though, has been the time I've been able to steal to drink in the
enormity and immaculate artistry of Winsor McCay: Little Nemo in
Slumberland: So Many Splendid
Sundays!. Maresca's selection
of McCay
color 1905-1910 Sunday pages is stunning; his editorial decisions are a
delight, the text pieces punctuating the selections are worthwhile, and
the color reproduction makes full use of the state-of-the-art
technology available to provide the richest, closest-to-the-source
reproduction of the chosen Sunday pages imaginable. But the almost
overwhelming power of this new collection is due primarily due to the
key decision to reproduce the Sunday pages in their full dimensions --
that's right, this tome measures over 21" x 16". It's a monster book, a
thing of beauty, and an absolutely essential addition to any devoted
comics library.
--Stephen Bissette, writer, artist, Swamp Thing
Settle
into a comfortable chair, spread open the pages of this colossal book
and be transported back to the glory days of the Sunday funnies!
Peter Maresca has lovingly restored more than one hundred episodes of
Winsor McCay's groundbreaking newspaper feature, Little Nemo
in
Slumberland ,
and reprinted them in their original size and color so that 21st
century readers can appreciate the stunning artistry of this
100-year-old graphic masterpiece. Looking at McCay's
drawings as if
for the first time, I soon found myself wondering, "What other comic
strips deserve to be showcased in this spectacular format?" Little
Nemo
in Slumberland So Many Splendid Sundays
1905 - 1910
will, hopefully, be the first of many
collections to recapture the
magic of classic American comic strips, reproduced the way they first
appeared to newspaper readers many years
ago.
--Brian Walker, comics historian, The Comics
Before 1945, cartoonist, Hi and Lois
I want to say a few ecstatic words
about one of the most spectacular
publishing projects to come to fruition in recent years, namely Peter
Maresca's stunning new hardcover book, Winsor McCay's Little Nemo
in Slumberland: So Many Splendid
Sundays, 1905-1910. The
first of
the
book's numerous virtues is its size: measuring 16x21 inches, it
reprints Little Nemo at
a size that approaches if it does not, in fact, duplicate exactly the
size McCay's legendary strip originally appeared at. The second stunner
is that the strips are reproduced in the manner that I have always
favored: the book's pages were shot from the newspaper pages that
printed the strip. What we see here is what we would see if we were
reading Little Nemo in our Sunday paper in
1905-1910.
This
is how vintage comics should be reprinted. Not re-jiggered and touched
up and imposed upon a slippery white paper. Not reconstructed.
Reconstructed artwork is invariably muddied and botched, no matter how
very careful and expert the re-toucher may be. Reconstructed artwork is
different artwork. Better to use what the cartoonist left us--the strip
as published during his lifetime. And the artwork should be reproduced
on paper that approaches the unshiny state of the pulpy newsprint that
the pages were first printed on. The most exacting reproduction that
can be achieved in re-coloring the original turns into but a garish
glimpse of the glory that once was when it's published on slick paper.
Maresca, in short, has done everything right here: he published the
strips on non-glare paper, slightly off-white like the original
newsprint. What a marvelous book! Stupendous -- a genuine treat!
--R.C. Harvey, writer, historian, The Comics
Journal, The Genius of Winsor McCay
I've been teaching McCay's work for
almost 35 years in major research
universities via slides and video projections of scans from reprints,
and I can truly say that this is the first time I've actually "seen"
them! Even though the projected images were much larger, the tangible
feel, look, and smell of the paper and ink used to produce the book so
lovingly have created "instant nostalgia" for me. It's as though these
indeed are actually the dreams I've had of the Little Nemo
strips all along but couldn't locate in the physical world. You've
created an ontological displacement of McCay's work and magically
restored to the process of reproduction the "aura" that Walter Benjamin
argued had been sucked out of originals by their very reproducibility.
You have reinvested the original reality of the art as inherent
reproduction in ways that even the original readers couldn't quite have
experienced, I think. McCay must have been smiling somewhere as these
books were finally printed and bound--his vision has been fulfilled.
--Donald Ault, Professor of English, University of Florida
.
. . "Little Nemo
in Slumberland," undoubtedly his
[McCay's] best-known
comic strip work, has been hailed by readers and critics for decades,
leading to several reprintings. But none of these collections, no
matter how carefully selected or produced they might be, have managed
fully to convey one of the most impressive aspects of the comic:
McCay's exploitation of the entire newspaper page to
produce
both stunning, expansive vistas and delicate, detailed miniature images
- often on the same page. Until now.
This is . . . a book so
absolutely stunning in every detail that it literally left me
speechless. Editor Peter Maresca has produced what can only be called a
labor of love: a hardcover, full-scale collection of 110 "Nemo" pages,
commemorating the strip's centennial. . . I've read all of the strips
here before, some of them literally dozens of times; but seeing them
again in this book was like discovering brand-new territory, an oasis
in a desert you'd never before realized you inhabited. To be able to
linger over these images, absorbing all of the minute details in the
drawing and the often amazing subtleties of the coloring, is a luxury
I'd never dreamed of. I can't begin to comprehend all of the technical
issues Maresca had to confront to produce such an exquisite volume; but
whatever he went through, it was more than worth it.Fans of comic art
the world over owe him a debt of gratitude which none of us can ever
repay individually. A book this significant belongs in every library in
the land.
I've included "Little Nemo" in many
of the courses I've taught over the
years. After explaining to my students that the original printed pages
were about twice the size of the Dover edition, I've confessed that I
truly envied the strip's original readers - especially the kids of,
say, six years old - who had the privilege to almost literally "fall
into" Nemo's world, who could have
their
entire field of vision filled
with McCay's imagination. Today, reading Little
Nemo: So Many
Splendid Sundays
, I finally felt like I was six years old.
--Gene Kannenberg, Jr., Professor of English,
University of Houston
"I
certainly wasn't prepared for this! It'd be impossible to even
dream
up such an absolutely incredible object--just stunning . . . it truly
is like you've never seen these strips before--to experience them as
they no doubt existed in McCay's ideal world is nothing short of a
revelation."
--Todd Hignite, editor, publisher of Comic Art
magazine
"The
most important comic book of the year. Perhaps the most important
cultural event in comics for a very long time. You cannot just put this
book amongst the others. You keep it out on the table."
--Benoît Peeters, writer, editor, publisher of Little
Nemo, 1905-2005, un
siècle de
rêves
retail price - $120.00
copacetic
price
- out of stock
Other amazing books
published by Sunday Press:
Sundays with Walt and Skeezix by Frank King
Little Sammy Sneeze by Winsor McCay
and, NOW
AVAILABLE: Little
Nemo in Slumberland - Many More Splendid Sundays!
prices and
availability
current as of 8 December 2009