>> From the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C. >> Teri Sierra: So my name is Teri Sierra. I'm the Chief of the Serial and Government Publications division here at the Library of Congress, which happens to be the home of our comic book collection. Our comic book collection is probably one of the largest in the world. At this point, we have, Georgia, jump in if I am not right on the number, more than 135,000 single issues. Yeah, it is a big wild number. So we acquire and we maintain, we preserve, and we serve our collection of comic books to researchers from all over the world. And by library standards, this is a gold level collection, it's very important to us. So SPX is subset, SPX meaning small press expo collection is a subset of our comic book collection. And it came about through an agreement that the library signed with a small press expo in 2011 that allows us to collect a set amount of issues from the small press on the weekend, which is this weekend, of small press, including the Internet winners, all the winners and nominees, we collect. I personally think of this lecture not part of the agreement but it's become a tradition that on the SPX weekend, we start with a lecture. And I believe that we kick off the weekend. So today's lecture celebrates the success of these 3 gentlemen. Josh O'Neill, Andrew Carl, and Chris Stevens, publishing through their own Locust Moon press, the Eisner Award Winner Little Nemo, Dream Another Dream. I love that name, that title. Isn't it great? Dream another dream. Anyway, it is based, for those of you who may or may not know, in Nemo in Slumberland, the comic strip created by the very talented Winsor McCay. I think it's fair to say that he transformed the comic strip comic book art world for his use of form, color, panels, timing, size, and so many other things. McCay's style has influenced the comic strip artists since, numerous comic strip artists. And as you see, if you see -- do we have some of the old from the New York Herald? Okay, the best of. >> We'll be seeing some. >> Teri Sierra: Okay, awesome. It's beautiful stuff, it really, really is. It was published originally in the New York Herald in 1905, and ran there until 1911. 1911, it went to the New York American, under the name of Land of Wonderful Dreams, another great title. It ran there until 1924, and finally ceased publication in 1926. So today, I can't wait to hear from our speakers about how they came about the idea. And interestingly, how to used Kickstart to fund. So please welcome Josh and Chris, known in Philadelphia as the mayors of comics world. And from San Francisco, comic writer on his own right and editor-in-chief of Locust Moon Press. Welcome gentlemen. [ Applause ] >> Chris Stevens: Thank you very much. My name is Chris Stevens. It's good to see everyone here, thanks for coming out. This is my partner, Andrew Carl, Josh O'Neill. And we're invited to speak to you here today on the eve of SPX about our book, "Little Nemo, Dream Another Dream." We gathered 140 of our favorite creators. Book's coming in right on time [laughter]. Thank you, Ester. We gathered 140 of our favorite contemporary creators to pay tribute to Winsor McCay who was a great American cartoonist and innovator in several media, which we'll get into shortly. There's Winsor, dapper fellow, as you can see. He was born it's says 1870, one of the peculiar facts of McCay's life is no one really knows when he was born, it sort of lost a time. It was sometime 1865 to 1870. He was born in Michigan. A very hardscrabble sort of homesteader life, rural lifestyle. But from a young age, he displayed classic prodigies, abilities in art as a drawer artist. And by the time he was a teenager, he left home for what must have been to him a sort of bustling metropolis beckoning of Cincinnati. He arrives in Cincinnati and McCay works at various department stores, creating window signage. He creates circus posters for the fledgling PT Barnum wannabes of the day. I don't think he ever worked for Barnum particularly. It would have been an interesting connection. But McCay, more than anything, McCay drew. He drew editorial illustrations. He drew he created numerous strips besides Nemo, which we're going to speak about today. He created "The Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend," which is endured, "Sammy Sneeze," many things, including some famous and revolutionary work in animation. And here you can see his most famous and probably his personally most beloved creation when it comes to his work in animation, "Gertie the Dinosaur." McCay drew the way a horse runs, we like to say. And he in one month produced over 4000 single illustrations, to give you a second or 2 of the type animation you see here. So, you know, aside from his achievements as a comic strip artist and one of the founders of the medium, he was important the work he did in animation as well. But the main work, the work that turns us on the most, the work that our book is based on, and the reason we're here today is "Little Nemo in Slumberland," which started in 1905, as Teri said, and ran until 1911 in its original incarnation in the New York Herald. That's the most fondly remembered. Afterwards, the work was good. He was probably a little more handcuffed by the powers that be. His life was probably a little more complex, and maybe there wasn't some of the -- you know, he didn't quite have the pure wonder that the original 5, 6 year run had. I think all the creators we've shown today were from the 5 years, from the first 5 years. And for those of you not familiar with "Little Nemo," these are 2 pages that are pretty good examples. Basically every page a little boy would fall asleep at the beginning of the strip. Enter into fantastical adventures and various dream worlds. And by the end, would always wake up in the final panel safe at home, mom and dad, back in the real world. For us all here gathered, I imagine we're all interested, you know, in comic book art in some level, and probably take a lot of the things for granted that McCay didn't have the luxury of taking for granted in either making the work or trying to figure out how his audience would absorb the work, even read the work. If you see here, McCay had to sort of resort to numbering the panels in a way, not to just rely on his ability, as great as he was to lead your eye, but to instruct the reader this is how you read a comic book page. Something probably we all take for granted, and you know, 100 years later, seems like, oh wow, they had to do that. But one of the things that is revolutionary as he was, as innovative as he was, he still had to be functional. And that's an interesting little fact of the form of function there. For me, one of the things I wanted to talk about when I realized we were going to be doing this talk today is, with McCay, and you can see it in the pages here, where did he -- what was he drawing on? There wasn't television. You weren't bombarded 24 hours a day with imagery from, you know, everywhere you go, you know. Where did he get the sense of wonder? What was he was pulling from? And there's a couple clear examples that we'll get into as me move forward here. The first being, one that's really obvious once you get into it, and that would be the World's Fair of 1893, the famous Chicago World's Fair, the famous White City. We were talking about this a lot last night as we tried to prepare for this, and something we all stumbled upon at the same time was, it's interesting to think, you know, however much you know about the White City, I'm no expert, but it was built at a time when artifice constructing, you know, vast buildings and plots of land that were never truly meant to be occupied. You see here a beautiful, you know, the cityscape, but you can't go to the top of that tower, the steps don't function, it's all a facade in the way we would think of cheap boardwalk amusements of today. But back then, it was really -- you know, we were trying to show the world that America was special, that we were as good as Paris, or any of the world powers of the time. And the White City was definitely a sign of American opulence and optimism. And it's pretty easy to think of McCay having -- these would have been widely replicated images. If you look to the postcard here on the right, that's something that without too much of your imagination, McCay himself could have drawn and it could be a backdrop for any one of the "Little Nemo" strips themselves. So for me, it's interesting to think of a man back then, like I said, without the repetition of imagery that we're so used to through the Internet. I mean, they had magazines but it wouldn't be anything like today. He would have carried this stuff around with him. He would have been in his 20s when he would have first come across these images. And he would have carried them around for years, until finally, inside a man with such a vivid imagination, the things that it would have stirred inside him could finally find their truest expression almost a dozen years later in the "Little Nemo" strips that began in 1905. So I think that's interesting to carry that around with you long enough where it comes out in such a sort of profound and large way that we're talking about 100 years later. And that's something he would have carried around with him would have been an influence for years and years. When he left Cincinnati, which I mentioned earlier, he also he eventually built a reputation as one of the top newspaper editorial comic book artists, and was hired away by the New York Herald. And went to New York where, you know, the life that we think of, if you're into Winsor McCay, you think of as urbane dignified sort of celebrity, you know, modern American celebrity at the dawn of the 20th century. But he got to there with these dreams in his head, and when he did get there, it was a nice fortuitous coming together of man and time where, instead of carrying around dreams in his head, he could sit on Coney Island, a place he frequented often, and see these sights that literally could have been drawn, if you guys are familiar with the "Nemo" strips, any of these images could have came straight out of any "Nemo" strip almost any time. And I think it's interesting to think of a man like McCay with this vivid innerlife without the stimulus that we're all so used to, just sitting there taking this in. And in life, he was sort of a notorious teetotaler. He would order one drink and sit with his socialite friends and it would sort of be a joke to see would Winsor ever finish his drink, and he never really did. But if you see these images, it's, you know, it's easy for me to project him being drunk off the scenes, the images, the experiences that were all around him on any given Coney Island evening. So I think the White City and Coney Island were really strong images you can reach out to and say -- or influences you can say these things were key in how to construct vivid fantasy on the page. And an example of which that I want to talk about here today is fairly iconic sequence from the first couple years of "Nemo," the Ice Palace sequence. It ran 7 pages. He had done sustained narrative stuff before the Ice Palace, he certainly did longer pieces after the Ice Palace. They are, you know, if you look at them here, if you're familiar with other "Nemo" pages, they're not the most technically dazzling pages that he did. We could show you other pages that would show off composition and just like tour de force drawing ability maybe a little bit more than these. But with these, I just I've always thought that the simplicity of the setting allowed it to establish itself as a place that is eternal. I think we all have whatever your background is, most people have from childhood, at least stamped inside them some sort of fantasy of a winter wonderland, whether it's Christmas or whatever the mythological, literally this is Jack Frost palace and that's Jack Frost you see sitting at the bottom right. It's that sort of, you know, iconography of religion or just a kid getting a school day off and going out and having a snowball fight, as we saw, in the previous pages, they're throwing snowballs around, we can all relate to that. And I think the simplicity of these pages sort of allowed them to become, at least for me and probably I imagine many others, a portal to visit those feelings, those times, the idea of this eternal winter wonderland at any time through the pages here that McCay provided. But like all fantasies, and I promise you, like this talk itself, everything does come to an end [laughter]. And can see here, after, you know, some fun stuff on the other side, the fantasy coming to an end, much like exactly like the White City itself, where this beautiful thing has been built, and it wasn't built to last. The White City was built in 3 months, taken down in a year. This strip lasted 7 pages, and at the very end, the high price ice company comes in, and literally disassembles Jack Frost palace brick by brick, you know, snowball by snowball. So it's sort of a bittersweet ending. For all the fantasy and beauty of McCay's work, like pretty much any great artist or communicator, it was tempered by the reality of the world he lived in, you know, the things that we all go through. And this strip is sort of poignant in that for all the fantasy, it does come to an end. As does my part of this talk. I'm going to turn you over to my partner Josh O'Neill, him and Andrew are going to get a little bit more into our book and some of the techniques and things that the artists involved in that got into. But I'll let Josh take the floor. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Josh O'Neill: So I'm going to talk about a lot of different things, but one thing I wanted to mention about these pages is, I love the ending of this Ice Palace sequence because it's the basic "Little Nemo" format, sort of writ large. It's this crazy wild adventure with all these beautiful edifices, this glorious world, and then in the end, it's just this totally mundane suburban world that kind of intrudes on it and interrupts it, I think it's pretty cool. And these pages and a lot of the other stuff that Chris showed, to me, demonstrates that Winsor McCay was and remains one of the greatest American artists, and "Little Nemo" is one of the truly singular bodies of work in American art. So we decided to bastardize it in the most grandiose way we possibly could. For our anthology, we recruited 140 of the greatest cartoonists and illustrators in the world, people who loved McCay, people who had studied his work, people who had been inspired by it. And we tasked them with creating brand-new "Little Nemo" strips in this giant size art book replicating the space of that glorious broad sheet page that he was using. We asked that they retain the basic structure of "Little Nemo," which is that each strip is a dream and in the end there's a return to reality where the dreamer awakes. One of the things that was most exciting to us about this book was how seeing how this love of McCay and this inspiration cuts across all these different boundaries in the comic book industry from the superheroes to independent comics, from industry legends to self published zine makers and everything in between. Because McCay was an artist who was standing at the dawn of this brand-new comics medium, and declaring that you could do anything on a comics' page. And the cartoonists in this book are people who have spent their careers taking up that challenge and treating this medium as incredibly potent and rich art form that is. And that combination of inspiration and the intimidation of trying to live up to this incredible work I think brought out the best in a lot of people. So we were also inspired not just by McCay and Nemo, but by these specific "Little Nemo" additions by a company called Sunday Press. They started coming out 10 years ago. And there have been many "Little Nemo" reprint editions over the years, but these are the first ones that reprint the strips at their original 16 by 21 size. For our tastes as far as books as art objects go, this is about as good as it gets, these are some of the most beautiful publications we've ever seen. The strips are so lovingly restored. And we can't imagine a book that does what these books do any better in terms of honoring Nemo. So we used the vast resources of creativity and publishing acumen at our disposal to copy them exactly [laughter]. We were lucky enough, Peter Maresca, the publisher of Sunday Press, worked with us and helped us figure out a lot of the design and production questions about the book and helped us create this addition that we hope can sit as a companion to his. What Peter did in publishing these books was a real service to art history and to comic lovers and readers everywhere, because seeing "Little Nemo" at a reduced size is like watching Lawrence of Arabia on your phone. You can enjoy it, you can appreciate it, you can see that it's something great, but you can't absorb the true majesty of what it's trying to do. Because the 16 by 21 page was this huge canvas that McCay was exploring and exploiting every week, every Sunday. He seized it like a piece of vital territory in the visual world. And it's a very rare thing for cartoonists these days to be able to work at this size with print suffering and with newspaper comics shrinking and dying, it's a very rare opportunity. So I think people -- to have not only the opportunity to work at this scale, but with this outside inspiration was a really amazing and irresistible challenge for a lot of people. This is Mark Campbell's page. As you can see, he worked to the exact size of the book, as a lot of the cartoonists did. And it really allowed them to look at their strip not just as a piece of content to be reproduced at a certain size, but a physical piece of art that could be approached as an object the reader would have to reckon and interact with. So I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the strips in particular, how some of McCay's own inspirations that Chris talked about get filtered down into some of these artists. This is Peter Bag's strip from the book. He took on McCay's classic circus mirror trop in which characters are distorted and stretched across the page. I've always loved how these circus strips, they make use of this giant space, they force you to deal with it as one giant page. They almost they reject your attempts to read it sequentially, you have to look at the whole thing at once. And it was this amazing way that McCay really took control of your eyes and really commanded the way you saw as a reader and a viewer of his artwork. Peter Bag's artwork, he's one of my favorite cartoonists, he's known for these comics called "Hate" that are very intimate and personal comics about this guy named Buddy and his pals. And he is about as far from McCay in terms of the scale and scope of what he's trying to do. He's telling these very, very personal stories. But I loved seeing, he's using his hate characters in this strip, but he's bringing McCay's influence into it to create something a little more illustrative and bold and dreamlike. It's almost like the circus mirror of McCay's influence is distorting Peter's work. This is almost the opposite approach. If that was Peter bringing McCay into his own style, this is an artist named JD Jones, who's very well known for his like beautiful painted superhero covers and many different well known mainstream comics. He has a very identifiable and idiosyncratic style. But for this strip, he really taught himself to draw almost exactly like McCay. With help from these gorgeous color from Jose Villarrubia that really replicated the Nemo colors. He's rifting on this classic setting the steps in front of the Palace of Slumberland where a lot of Nemo strips were set. And it's an amazing thing to be able to draw like McCay and in doing so, I think he created one of the most beautiful and visionary strips in the book. So "Little Nemo" in its essence was a very joyous, adventurous, sometimes silly strip. But it also dealt with a lot of heavier themes, about aging, and loss, and death, and frailty, and failure. This [inaudible] is maybe the saddest "Little Nemo" strip. It's one of his New Year's Day strips. His New Year's Day strips were often very sad, which is an idea that I like. He's always kind of bringing in the new year with kind of a downer. So in this strip on the left, father time who always appears in the New Year's Day strips. He takes Nemo on a tour of the office where they keep all the years. And so he's taking down these different years, and you can see the numbers he's handing them. And when Nemo touches the year, he becomes the age that he will be on that year. And by the end when he reaches the impossibly distant year of 1999, he becomes an old man and you see him in that second to last panel alone in the darkness on a snowy night, just begging to be made into a young boy again. Happy New Year [laughter]. On the right is a JH Williams strip, who was kind of riffling off this idea. McCay always, I think as Chris mentioned, he numbered his panels, which is kind of an aid to readers to help them understand. Since comics were such a brand-new medium at the time, it was sort of a way to hold people's hands through how to read a comic strip. But in Williams strip, he's using that technique, but instead of panel numbers, he's using the age of Nemo. And he's trying to compress Nemo's whole life into one page. And, you know, just like in the strip on the left, by the end, he's a sad old man and then awakes as a little boy again. To me, this strip is so beautiful, it's so full of life, it's literally full of a person's life. And JH Williams is very well known for his formal innovations, his incredibly complex and beautiful compositions, and I thought it was cool that for this project, rather than amp that up like might've been a lot of people's impulse, he decided to do something very human scale and just see how much of a person's life he could condense onto one piece of paper. This is Katie Moody's strip. She took a really interesting kind of conceptual approach to this piece. She actually traced this "Little Nemo" strip on the left and used changes to the text and different coloring techniques to kind of tell a story about how this famous Nemo strip of Nemo sliding down this endless banister got sort of transmitted through time and how she first encountered it as a child in a Raggedy Ann cartoon. And so she's sort of tracing back how McCay's influence filtered down to her and how she eventually found her way back to McCay. And she's sort of using this existing strip almost as a telephone to talk directly to the reader. I thought that was very interesting. This is Cole Closser's strip. It's a very mournful and nostalgic and touching take on a sort of forgotten decaying Slumberland. That character walking around there is Flip. He's Little Nemo's sometimes his best friend, sometimes his nemesis. But he's probably the secondary character of Slumberland. And he's walking around this skeleton, which is the skeleton of Bosco the Dragon, who is this dragon who had a thrown inside of his mouth and Flip and the Princess and Nemo would ride around inside. So in Closser's strip, Flip is walking around, and this Dragon reminds him of something but he can't really remember what, he's trying to think back. He remembers that there were kind of adventures in the old days but he can't really remember what happened. He thinks there was a boy, he can't remember his name, he thinks his name might have been no one, which is what Nemo means in Latin. And then up in the right-hand upper corner there is a drawing of McCay's house in Sheepshead Bay where he lived for many years that he would often drawn into his own "Little Nemo" strips. One of the most difficult aspects of this project was dealing with the character of the jungle Imp, a cartoonish racial African savage caricature, who spouts gibberish whenever he speaks. McCay was a man of his time and though he very politically progressive in many ways, his worked betrayed some unenlightened views about race and gender. The last thing that we wanted to do was gloss over the more problematic aspects of "Little Nemo." And it would have felt dishonest to whitewash a character who, for better or for worse, was very central to the Slumberland cast. So our best solution was just to address it head on, let each artist make of the Imp what they would. Farel Dalrymple, for instance, in his strip had the Imp speaking perfect English. And when Nemo says, "how is it that I can understand you," the Imp says "that maybe you used to be more racist in your dreams." [laughter] Cliff Chang addresses the Imp in his sort of dehumanizing mask in a very interesting way that we'll look at a little bit later. But the artist that approached it most head on was Ronald Wimberly, who makes the Imp the hero of his strip and gives him a kind of heroism and mobility that he never got from McCay. This strip simultaneously pays admiring tribute to McCay's ambition and design sensibility while calling out something that needs to be called out and addressed. James Harvey is a very interesting example to me, because he really kind of. You know, we've been talking about strips that so close to McCay, you know, like JH Jones, the ones that take it in whole new directions, James really split the difference between channeling McCay and doing his own thing. He got the look, as you can see, of Little Nemo really just right. He gives the flatiron building the same kind of glory that the Palaces of Slumberland have. That exploding sun on the right-hand side of the page there, that's a pure McCay image that could come straight out of "Little Nemo" stip. He also James studied the New York Herald pages very carefully to like reverse engineer a coloring technique that would really capture that feeling of lithographic news printing. But on the other hand, this incredibly experimental layout, you can see, you see where that clown is on the lower left-hand side? That's where the strip begins, it reads to the right and then up and around the top of the flatiron building and down into the subway in this sort of tortured circle. Though it's very much in the spirit of these incredibly adventurous designs that McCay would have, that's the type of thing that McCay never would've done or tried. For all of McCay's inventiveness, there were certain rules that he always adhered to. Every strip he ever did read from left to right and top to bottom. They generally the camera angle really doesn't change, the characters are always presented in the same perspective, almost like they're on like a persimmon stage. So James, to me, in doing something that's so close to McCay in some ways but violates so many of his rules, he's somebody that's not -- he's not just channeling McCay, but he's sort of taking the hand off from him and trying to keep the ball moving downfield. Which is what I think a lot of the cartoonists in this book are doing. It's about McCay was someone who was constantly pushing this medium forward. He was so aware that he was at the dawn between animation and cartooning, he knew that he was right at the beginning of art forms that really mattered. And not many people thought that way back then. But McCay thought that way from the very beginning of his career. And it was a real honor to be able to work on this book with all these people who I think are his inheritors in that sense of taking this stuff as seriously as it deserves to be taken. So now my partner, Andrew Carl, Editor-and-Chief of Locust Moon, will tell you a little bit more about the strips that took McCay's influence in whole new directions. [ Applause ] >> Andrew Carl: So yeah, James Harvey's strip is really interesting to me for the reasons Josh laid out in that it does sort of split the difference between this sort of slavish visual recreation of McCay's esthetic while also doing things he never would have thought of doing. And some of the strips that I want to talk about today are ones that did go even farther afield on every level, whether it's visually or by taking a sort of more metafictional or referential approach to [inaudible], to Nemo, to Slumberland, to McCay himself. So I guess I'd start with one that's one of the most extreme departures, which was "Mike and Laura Allred." Where, as you can see, there are no Slumberland characters. There are barely any panels. Instead of reading top to bottom, or even, you know, in a sort of circle like Dreams did, this one reads as sort of a inward spiral. Which doesn't even end with a wake up panel, it ends with this sort of just moment of clarity right in the middle. So it broke pretty much every rule that McCay had or that we would expect out of the book, but it actually works beautifully anyways. And it's sort of became this sort of meditation on the relationship between dreams and death that's really beautiful. And the essence of McCay is so captured, both in the experimentation in it and the sort of unreliable but still very perfectly formed lines that construct the space. So in another sense, we also have Rosa Gonzalez's strip, which is again a huge visual departure from McCay. And Rosa is a fine artist who decided to tell sort of a border crossing fable, which is very deeply personal to him. His parents were migrant workers that traveled back and forth between America and Mexico when he was a child. And I think he was able to fuse that very personal set of experiences and personal sort of dreamlike approach to these ideas with the way McCay approached his own fantasies. And that was why this one feels so clearly in the spirit of a McCay strip, with the ways he approaches the page and escalates the sort of insanity and renders it beautifully, and does have sort of thick standings for the characters that we're familiar with. But it feels just like a personal as personal to him as Nemo felt to McCay. And we really loved him for that. And then there's -- I don't know what shows up on the screen. But my [inaudible] took a really different direction where she created a whole strip out of cut paper. And this strip it was excellently done visually, but is also very interesting because not only did it break the fourth wall, which McCay did a lot in his work, but it also even sort of breaks the 2 dimensionality of the page itself. Where by the end of the strip, the panels are crumpling up and falling off the page, the panel numbers are slipping away, and everything is sort of chaos. And just from the material standpoint, it's something you would never expect to see happening in McCay's world, but again it's capturing exactly the sort of wild inventiveness that we expect. So I also want to talk about this strip by Dean Haspiel, which I guess compared to the last few we looked at, looks more normal, I guess. There's no burnt paper or, you know, crumpled up stuff. But Dean's strip is actually really, really interesting, and distantly very unique, in that he wasn't content to just pay tribute to McCay. He also wanted to bring in some of his other biggest influences as a comics creator. And reference some of the other sort of titans in the history of medium. And he does it through this story of basically setting up Little Nemo asking if he ever really woke up over the course of his life, has he ever got out of bed. Because we never -- even when he woke up in the comics, it was only ever in that one little room in that little bed. So what if that really was his whole existence. And here, we're seeing, with the help of some of McCay's sort of fellow master comic artists, a sort of journey where he leaves that room for the first time and discovers, you know, some of the things he's been missing in the outside world. So of course, you have George Herriman's "Krazy Kat" and "Ignatz," balking him out of sleep in and inspiring him to get out of bed. And by the time he walks out, he ends up in sort of Will Eisner's where he lived in kind of gritty New York streets. And he looks up in the sky and there is Jack Kirby's, you know, technical or superheroes exploding into each other above him. And when he finally, you know, at least appears to find some kind of reason for all this, of course that's the moment that he wakes up again safely back in the world McCay as a child. Because after all, this is still a "Little Nemo" strip. Now, Bob Secoriac [phonetic] is another artist who decided to blend influences with McCay. But unlike Dean Haspiel, he reached far outside of comics. And he decided to sort of create a fusion between 2 characters or artists in a sense who were really obsessed with the ideas of dreams. And if you're curious and can't tell who influenced what in this piece, it was just all [inaudible] [laughter]. And yeah, so something that I think makes this one really effective is that Bob was able to really, you know, it looks different, but in a similar sense, like, you know, James Harvey or JG Jones, replicate a lot of the visual language and antics of McCay in terms of the character staging, the very, you know, the way the panels are laid out, the lettering even, with all its little quirks and wobbles that everyone always questions just how intentional it was on McCay's part. But he uses all of this like very clear McCay imagery to tell a story that's or it's almost give a lecture from the perspective of Freud that's really all in his words. So it becomes sort of this alternate universe fusion of almost what if Freud were the brilliant cartoonist and not McCay. But you see, it also has a little cameo from Gerdie in the corner there, which is an extra nice little touch. And then there were a few strips in the book that more directly dealt with Winsor McCay specifically as a person. Like for example, Phil Barlow's piece here, is this really energetic but also kind of depressing biography of McCay's life from life to death. From, you know, his various interventions and artistic pursuits up until he ended up pretty depressingly shackled by his obligations to William Randolph Hearst and the New York Herald, where he was stuck for a lot of the later years of his life and not able to really pursue, especially cartoons, as an art form. And of course, an extra little fun thing about this strip is that in the final panel, where he both dies and of course falls out of bed, it does include a sort of dig on the comic and this whole project itself, where after he dies, his wife says to him, "Oh, what a pity, but now that most of Winsor's work is public domain, he can be imitated by lesser artists with a fraction of the skill and vision." [laughter] So yeah, that's where we come in. And then yet Cliff Chang is another artist who really got right up to McCay's door, you know, physically. These are McCay's characters basically visiting him in that Sheepshead Bay home. And whispering in his ear and inspiring him to draw one last page basically, create one more dream, which is really it's really sweet, I think. But the most powerful part of this stip to me is, is the way he treated the Imp character. Where in the first panel, you know, he's holding the mask of what McCay had him look like, which is this pretty cartoonish gross caricature. And he's looking at it saying, "how silly." Which I read as sort of a child's monocular of, you know, bullshit. And if you follow the rest of the strip as the Imp's journey, which I think is easy to do, especially because, you know, for this character in particular, who has such a strange unfortunate existence, this to me is one of the places where he feels like a -- the has the energy of a real child, like a real being throughout the strip. Like when he's walking on the banister. And at the end, he does get a chance to whisper in his own creator's ear, as this sort of real boy who is trapped under the mask of a sort of gross race character and tell him something that perhaps he needed to hear. And maybe as long as Winsor lived, he never really did get a chance to hear that or internalize it. So I think with Cliff's strip, he gave a sort of hopeful idea of, you know, maybe we would have hoped that this kind of thing would happen, that at some point that would have been an enlightening moment to him that those characters could reach out and say, You know what, this could be better. So the next few things that I want to talk about are strips that directly dealt with the very, you know, the most common trop of Nemo, which is the wake-up panel. In which, you know, we've talked about before, every page would end with one of these. And a lot of times he would be falling out of bed. And they were very useful I think for McCay and for the artist who worked on the book, because they allowed for sort of safety net or reset button. Because no matter what happened on the page, on matter what formal experiments are going on, or what crazy danger Nemo ends up being in, we know at the end, he'll get out of it, he'll be safe, he'll be in bed. And that'll be the end of that. So a few artists in our book decided to engage that pretty directly. With Gowan Showman [phonetic], basically, extrapolating, well, if there's a boy who is really violently falling out of bed from nightmares every single night, what's the end game here. It might not look too great. So going in further down that rabbit hole is Jim Ruck, who did this beautiful very conceptual minimal piece, who sort of asked the other question, which is, what if it didn't work. Like what if that last panel wasn't there to catch him, what if there's a hole in the net. And what if he just kept falling forever in a dream like. You know, as you see, that's the edge of the page there, he's not even confined to a newspaper page anymore, he's just in ether. And that sort of you would think would be the single most frightening thing for a character who lives in this fictional world, it's like even that last escape is, you know, he's in the wind now. So the last strip I want to talk about is actually one that also addressed the confines of the newspaper page, because it really just blew through it. So Paul Revosh [phonetic] is one of the few artists in the book that decided to take up more that one page, which was really the one most like ironclad rule the McCay always had to follow. I mean, it's a big page. Josh, if you hold up our book, like that's a big comic. You can fit a lot on a page, and that's how big the newspapers were. But maybe it's not enough for all of us. And I love the way here that Paul sort of acknowledges the idea that, you know, a Nemo strip is supposed to end in the bottom-right corner of a single page by literally just blowing up the page with these balloons, and bring us, no, no, let's go back to the top and have some more fun before we get to the bottom. And that idea of breaking just the ultimate rule is is to me one of the reasons that made this such a perfect tribute, because you know, that's what McCay was all about, was breaking the rules. But even we had some. So right here at the end, I just I also want to talk about this last strip from McCay, which is actually the final page in our book. And when we selected it, we didn't want to go for one of the crazy visual masterpieces to show off, like, hey, McCay really was a good artist, don't you believe us. We decided to focus on one that was more about his humor and could offer a nice perspective on the book that you would have just read. So in the strip, the Slumberland characters as it goes on, are getting increasingly more poorly drawn. And by the end, they've been turned into these really crude stick figures. Which, if you look at them, they're actually kind of awesome stick figures, because McCay probably was not capable of drawing really bad art. But the characters meanwhile are complaining about, you know, what's going on, like this isn't the way I'm supposed to be drawn, like make me look like I'm supposed to look, I want to go back to normal. And of course, in the wake-up panel, there he is, back drawn in McCay style, safe and sound. And to me, this felt like such a great way to end the book where McCay was brought into all of these weird situations that neither here nor McCay had any say in. In the end, really experimented on all these new ways, but ultimately, you know, we felt it was important to make sure that the end of the journey back in McCay's hands, and no worse for wear. So I do think though if McCay woke up today and saw where comics have come, I think he would be pretty astounded by it, by the evolutions that have gone underway and the amount of people who are really using the singular and experimental voices to bring comics forward, with all the people in this book, but far beyond that. And I want to bring up a little anecdote that Josh told me about actually, where Winsor was invited to a dinner in the 1920s of a bunch of animators who gathered and wanted to hear him talk since he was one of the fathers of, you know, what they're all doing. And McCay was by all accounts very playful, nice, delightful guy. He was not a, you know, jerk, but he did stand up, you know, in front of all these gathered animators and he more or less told them that, you know, I created this medium a decade ago, and none of you have moved it forward [laughter]. You've just commercialized it and you've cheapened it and you're exploiting it when you should be exploring it. And I think in contrast to that, if we held a similar dinner today, with you know, inviting a lot of people in this book and a lot of the people who are going to be, you know, at SPX over the next few days, I think he would feel like he fit in a lot more, and hopefully he wouldn't be yelling at anyone [laughter]. That's all I've got. [ Applause ] >> We have about 5 minutes or so left for questions. >> Well question 1, did Winsor McCay actually draw on 16 by 21? >> Slight slightly larger, slightly larger. >> He would have to use multiple pieces of paper because the surface wasn't -- you know, you couldn't reach. >> And he didn't always draw it the same size either. He was always larger than 16 by 21. >> We just came from the archives and saw the original, it was like [inaudible]. >> Which strip was it? [ Inaudible Response ] >> Yeah, the Billy Island Museum. >> They have a lot of the strips in Ohio State University. >> Yeah, they have a big McCay collection [inaudible]. >> What's the medium he's using to color? >> Well, he wasn't coloring them. I mean, he would work very closely with the New York Herald staff who had at the time it was like the best coloring that a newspaper had ever seen. And so he would direct them very specifically on how he wanted the colors to look and then it would be done by the newspaper staff. >> Is that what your artists did as well? >> No, our artists mostly colored their own work. And I mean, people worked in so many different media, in different, you know, some people did watercolors, other people it's all digital colors, and everything in between from, you know, cut paper to whatever. >> And like James Harvey who Josh talked about, for example, he basically digitally recreated the then day dot process that would have gone in printing presses then. And that's how he was able to recreate those colors so well. >> A bunch of artists took different approaches to trying to recreate that look of like the colored dots, and it's interesting to see how they each figured out their own style. >> What was McCay's reaction to Walt Disney's work in the '20s? >> What was McCay's reaction to Walt Disney's work? He was a fan. I think he was the first person he saw actually, like I was saying, doing something with animations. And I actually just recently visited the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, and in it there's an original cell from the sinking of the Lusitania, which is one of McCay's other animated shorts, that he'd given to Walt Disney and signed it to him and said like -- I can't remember the exact message on it, but it was basically, you know, thanks for keeping it up, basically. >> How was the processing like in creating the stories, were they initially just give you a script and you guys had to approve it, approve layouts; or they just said surprise me and you've got a final, you know, digital production? >> It was a different process for different artists. >> Generally it was a pretty loose editorial process. I mean, we worked with a cartoonist whose work we respected and we kind of said, okay, it's got to be a dream, it doesn't even have to be Nemo, but it needs to be a dream and it needs to end with the dreamer waking up. And kind of go from there. There wasn't really any like script process or anything like that, outside of there's a couple of examples of strips in here where there's a different artist and writer and sometimes somebody would submit a script to us and we would do some small editorials. >> Those are definitely in the minority. >> Those are kind of just a handful of strips. Mostly this was just people following their vision, and then we published their work. >> Tried to keep the content not R-rated or anything. >> Yeah. Keep it like relatively -- I mean, there's some pretty disturbing stuff in this book. >> But more like emotionally. >> We did tell people, like, you know, no nudity, try to keep it a little bit family friendly. >> Yeah. >> So I went to my local library after I saw this talk announced, and I was not aware of this like there was an exhibit at the New York Museum and the Jewish Museum, maybe 10 years ago or so, where I discovered all these reproductions that got me started. So I went to the library and I immediately said buy this, and they said, oh, it's not one of our approved vendors or whatever. But they had a smaller format. Idiots. Why are you sticking with. >> Give them our phone number [laughter]. >> So I don't know what the problem is with libraries. [inaudible] they're pretty progressive in art. So just I don't know what the practicalities of the publishing business are [inaudible]. I just wanted to let you know that there's this block. They had a small I guess you extract it and they have this in their teen section. >> Yeah. We recently partnered with a company, Toon Books, who it's run by Francoise Mouly, and they did sort of an abridged smaller selection of the pages that have some extra educational material and stuff in there. But it's maybe a quarter, if that, of the in here and the size is, you know [inaudible]. Well, you're looking at our publishing company [laughter]. >> You want to come on board [laughter]? >> Thank you for that, we've got to figure that out. >> Did all of the artists or was it only some, did they explain to you what they were doing? Or did you find the examples for most of those or debate and discuss that? And then also, do you have an idea how big the book was going to be from the beginning, or did you have to reject some, or did some people say no? So it is bigger or smaller? >> Okay, I can tackle a lot of this, I think. So most of the artists, most of these comparisons that we have were generated by us. I think Dean Haspiel's strip where he took in the other artists' influences, he did explain that to us like before he even started drawing it. And that leads to sort of your other question, which is that, when we originally pictured the book, it was going to be maybe 100 pages I think max, this one ended up being 144. Because we kept realizing, oh, we forgot another one of our favorite artists. And then artists we'd invited said, hey, my friend's really cool, do you think he could give a shot. And there were people who you saw today actually who were complete strangers to us who had, you know, heard about it and sent us a Facebook message. And, we're like, okay, I guess we'll see your stuff, and then it ended up being beautiful, and it's in the book. So it was really pretty much out of our control, it was just down to would fill out a book of just good stuff. And there were pieces then that were rejected from the book. And actually Dean Haspiel's first attempt at a strip we rejected, because it was beautiful, it was like well designed, but it didn't feel like it had the DNA of McCay in it so much. So while we loved it, we just couldn't figure how to fit it in the book, and we had to break it to him, like, look, we love you as a creator, this isn't really going to work though. So he tried to rework it a little bit, and we rejected it again [laughter]. And then, because he's just a patient angel and I guess really cared about the project. >> I'm looking around to see if he's here [laughter]. >> He decided to start from scratch and come up with what he saw. So there were other people who didn't, you know, for an understandable reason who didn't, you know, just like keep doing something until it made it into the book. But there are other ones who, usually, if pieces didn't make it in, it was because they just didn't seem to combine the personal engagement and engagement with McCay quite as much. Whether they used their personal characters but didn't really point them in the direction of McCay, or just you know, did something that felt a little more like kind of dry fan fiction sort of, which is not what we wanted. If it didn't have something it was like purely special and personal to that person, then it was, you know, it just wouldn't be the same. >> You could probably make a cool book with the strips we rejected, but they just didn't quite fit in to the overall mix that we were trying to put together. >> The quality was almost universally good, it was just about the. >> Rejection collection. >> Yeah, exactly [inaudible]. >> If we could take one more question. >> Go ahead, Bruce has been here since the beginning, give Bruce a chance. >> Nemo, when McCay did these projects, these were all Sunday strips. >> Yeah. >> Was this his full-time job, or did he also have to do daily things? >> He did other -- well, go ahead. >> He did these every week, he also had different strips that he would do at different times. He was also largely an editorial cartoonist, which was a huge part of what he would do. He would get assignments from the Herald to do certain illustrations and political cartoons. And in the like the 19 teens, that gradually became more and more of what his workload as an artist was. And though like the art is really stunningly beautiful, some of his stuff in those political cartoons is mind-blowingly gorgeous, it's not stuff that he really liked doing. It was a little bit of a graveyard for his creativity. He felt trapped having to do these things day in day out, when he really wanted to be working on animation and "Little Nemo," those were the 2 things he cared about most. >> Have they been reprinted? >> Yeah, there have been. I don't know if there are any in print right now, but there definitely have been collections of the McCay editorial stuff. And some of them, it's strange to look at some of them because some of them have the most ridiculous ideas, but then the art is like the most beautiful stuff you've ever seen. But they have this kind of tortured, pretentious, pompous ideas about society. And there's an editor named Arthur Brisbane who was the author of a lot of them, and you can tell he thought very highly of his own opinions. And he had this weapon of McCay to like put his opinions out there into the world. And I don't think McCay liked being that kind of weapon. >> We can't just do one more? What was your question? >> I was kind of curious, especially because you're all so passionate about "Little "Nemo," how you felt with the animated adaptation and the current runs for [inaudible] sort of stacked up. >> The animation, weirdly enough, I've never seen all the way through. Because by the time we started working on the book, I was like, I wanted my filter of McCay to be going straight from McCay. So it's something I'm like, okay, I'll get to it when I'm a little bit less, you know, into it. Because like the more personally I'm like invested in McCay's work, the more I might be annoyed by, you know, the '80s like torture adaptation of it. The story behind the movie is really interesting. But and then the IDW book I thought was really fun. IDW did a little miniseries, 4 issue miniseries, I think, that's sort of a modern kid, you know, jumping in and taking Nemo's place in Slumberland, and it's really cute. By one artist normal size. >> Yeah, beautiful artwork, just a very charming book. >> Thank you so much for having us here. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us@LOC.gov.