An illustration of MAD magazine's trademark Alfred E. Neuman as Uncle Sam.
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The evolution of the art arbiters' prissy attitude toward comics gradually evolved, thanks in part to Raw magazine, the alternative comics showcase that Spiegelman co-edited. In the early '90s he also convened a summit of museum curators in his Soho studio to help them understand what comics were. And weren't. "Comics are not necessarily trying to do what a Van Gogh on the wall was trying to do," he said. "They aren't the same kind of direct expression. They have something more in common with architectural drawings and set design. They are picture writing that has to function with other drawings on the same page."
Which is why seeing them on a museum wall is, as Bart Simpson would say, funny in so many ways.
THE HOUSE OF WINSOR
In the clear glass of hindsight, we see that the elite should have embraced the very first significant comics artist. That was McCay, who, just 100 years and a month before the Los Angeles museum show opened, published his first full-color page of Little Nemo in Slumberland in the New York Herald. Here was a popular art at its onset and apogee: not a primitive Lascaux cave painting but a Sunday-supplement Hieronymus Bosch — a glorious other-world of dreamscapes as phantasmagorical as they were funny.
Each adventure began with the boy Nemo in his hallucinogenic nightworld, provided some vision or threat, and ended with him waking up startled in bed at home. McCay must have taken inspiration from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the publishing sensation of the early 1900s. Nemo is quite like Dorothy Gale, less invigorated than intimidated by this fantastic world, and usually wanting to get back home. ("I don't like this one little tiny bit," he says, "not one tiny weeney bit.")
Certainly the dream-boy was welcome in Slumberland, where King Morpheus and his princess daughter are most obliging, and where Nemo befriends the sassy Flip and a gibberish-speaking cannibal, the Imp. Often, though, the magic turned to menace, as when a tuba's tubing grows longer and more serpentine with every note puffed on it; or when Nemo, now in an urban setting, is pursued by apartment building on long metallic legs; or when he, Flip and Imp get lost in overgrown weeds — the eyebrow of Nemo's grandfather. In a strip that ran on New Year's Eve, 1905, Father Time leads Nemo through a celestial hall of file cabinets. When the lad holds any large number — 9, 15, 25, 48 — he instantly becomes that age, until he's a creaky 99-year-old. That wakes him up in no time.
McCay's ingenuity splashed from content to form and back again. Each huge page could be broken up into six horizontal strips or five vertical ones (showing an elephant getting bigger and scarier as it approaches). The panels might be in wavy shapes, when Nemo, Flip and Imp land in Befuddle Hall and their bodies elasticize into funhouse-mirror images. Or there'd be a large round central image, like the one for Thanksgiving 1905, in which a giant turkey — a kind of poultry Godzilla — uproots Nemo's house with its beak. Thanksgiving two years later expanded upon the dinner-table creatures: the humungous turkey was joined by an equally large lobster, crab, duck... and dog!
McCay did some marketing of the Nemo brand (sandals) and in 1908 put the boy on Broadway, in a spectacle with music by Victor Herbert. But the strip didn't achieve great popularity; it was not syndicated nationally, running only in the New York Herald, then in the New York American. Decades would pass before a new generation of connoisseurs saw the art in Little Nemo. (Original pages can sell for $30,000 today.) The fish with the same name in the 2003 Pixar film is surely a tribute to McCay's pioneering lushness of imagination and precision of design.
And in 2005 his Nemo got the publishing treatment it deserved: a full-size (21-by-16-in.) book called So Many Splendid Sundays, created with love and by Peter Maresca, a former designer at Apple. As an art book, it's as gorgeous as any devoted to Michelangelo or Matisse, and the reproductions are better. You may not find a shelf with vertical space big enough to hold this book; and don't put it on a coffee table (whose service it would nearly cover), less you spill some frappuccino on it. But buy and treasure it — and hope that, unlike my copy, yours doesn't have one 16-page section printed twice. Oh well, it's close to perfect.
THE HERO AND THE SUPERHERO
Jules Feiffer became famous in the '50s for what many called the first adult comic strip, Sick Sick Sick (later just Feiffer), which ran in The Village Voice and other papers. But Feiffer knew the superhero comics so well because he loves them as a kid and he wanted to be an artist; he studied these strips from the wrist up. In his late teens he assisted Will Eisner in drawing The Spirit. Here's his evocative iconography of the comics hero: