So Many Splendid Sundays To Come

My God, I am in heaven. They’re doing a second printing of the amazing Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!, the collection of many of Winsor McKay’s greatest Sunday Nemo pages. This thing is just beautifully made. It’s actual size, too; each comic is lovingly restored at 16×21, as originally printed a hundred years ago in the pages of the newspapers in which they ran. These strips are what Bill Watterson held Calvin and Hobbes against, questioning the comic syndicates’ obsession with page real estate. Back before Scott Adams and Jim Davis perfected the three panel picayune (in bland black and white, of course) for Knight Ridder and McClatchy, folks like Winsor McKay and George Herriman were making huge, sweeping pieces of sequential art for William Randolph Hearst.
Anyway, they’re getting new copies in at Chapel Hill Comics. I have a distinct feeling I’ll be dropping a good chunk of change on this one. Like most my age, I didn’t discover Nemo through the funny pages, but thanks to the video game tie-in to the 1988 animation. Later, in high school, I came across a bulky, threadbare collection at the Durham Public Library, and kept it for a solid summer. I revelled in McKay’s vivid artistry and imaginative storytelling, warts and all. The man could rarely fit his vision into the speech bubbles his characters emitted, and I doubt that even this exquisite collection painstakingly edited by Peter Maresca will contain all of the splendor that is Slumberland, but there’s no way I can go without this.