Delving Deep into Nemo’s

Dreamworld Foucault’s Heterotopia Concept in the Dream Landscape of Winsor McCay’s Early 20th Century Comic Strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland”

Aantal woorden: 20.325

Orane Schotte Studentennummer: 01305919

Promotor: Dr. Maaheen Ahmed

Masterproef voorgelegd voor het behalen van de graad Master in de richting Vergelijkende Moderne Letterkunde

Academiejaar: 2017 - 2018

2 COPYRIGHT The author and the promotor(s) grant permission for this study as a whole to be made available for personal use. Any other use is subject to copyright restrictions, in particular with regard to the obligation of explicitly citing the source when citing data from this study. The copyright regarding data in this study rests with the promotor(s). Copyright is limited to the way in which the author has approached and written down the problems of the subject. The author respects the original copyright of the individually cited studies and any associated documentation, such as tables and figures.

3 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS AND WORDS OF THANKS

Below, you can see the instigator of this project. My thesis is the result of my curiosity that was piqued when, a long time ago, I stumbled upon this Little Nemo in Slumberland panel (by Winsor McCay) while surfing the web for graphic art. Working with Dr. Maaheen Ahmed – to whom I am very thankful for all her constructive criticism, help and insight – I was given the opportunity to approach this comic strip from a more academic point of view. I would also like to thank the people who ameliorated my work by refining my precocious ideas and voicing their honest thought – Jean Claude Schotte, Leen van Bogaert, and Amber Brown.

Figure 0. See sources.

4 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 6 - RESEARCH QUESTION 6 - RELEVANT FIELDS OF STUDY 7 o SOCIOLOGY – FOUCAULT’S CONCEPT OF THE HETEROTOPIA 7 o COMIC STUDIES 8 o MODERNITY AND POPULAR CULTURE 9 - THE ARTIST: WINSOR MCCAY 9 - A BRIEF NOTE ON THE TERM ‘COMIC’ 10 ANALYSIS 12 - SPACE IN THE HETEROTOPIA 12 o THE DREAMSPACE 12 § IMAGINATION: A VITAL ASPECT OF THE HETEROTOPIC SPACE 12 § THE DIALECTIC OF HOMELY AND UNCANNY 15 o THE SPACE OF THE NEWSPAPER: THE ‘FUNNIES’ SECTION AS A HETEROTOPIA 16 o THE CITY: A SPACE OF IMAGINATION OR CONTROL? 17 o SPACE AND MODERNITY 24 § THE NEWSPAPER 24 § MASS CULTURE AND IMMERSION (1) 25 § MODERN ENTERTAINMENT AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 26 • The Circus 26 • Amusement Parks 30 • Department Stores 33 § HETEROTOPIC POTENTIAL OF MODERN ENTERTAINMENT SITES: CONFIRMING THE STATUS QUO OR CRITIQUING IT? 35 - TIME IN THE HETEROTOPIA 40 o HOMOCHRONIA 41 § STORY ARC 41 § READING EXPERIENCE 44 § SPEECH 45 o HETEROCHRONIA 47 § PANEL LAYOUT 47 § (IR)REGULARITY 51 § TEMPORAL MAPPING AND STASIS 52 - IMMERSION INTO THE HETEROTOPIA: FORMAL AND STYLISTIC ASPECTS 54 o FORMAT AND IMMERSION (2) 54 o STYLE AND IMMERSION (3) 61 o CRITICISM 62 - FOR WHOM DOES THE HETEROTOPIA EXIST? 64 o THE ‘OTHER’ IN THE HETEROTOPIA 64 o LITTLE NEMO AND THE AMERICAN DREAM 68 CONCLUSIVE REMARKS ON THE HETEROTOPIA IN LITTLE NEMO 71 SOURCES 74

5 INTRODUCTION

RESEARCH QUESTION

By pausing for a moment to think about what might be hiding behind the weekly ‘funnies’ of Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905 – 1911) created by the artist Winsor McCay, it will quickly become clear that the work is far from merely trivial and humorous, as many people judge comic strips to be.

My research will revolve around the following question: to what extent do dream spaces in Little Nemo allow themselves to be read as heterotopias, or alternative spaces? To what extent can Little Nemo be read as an exploration of the heterotopia? A more detailed definition of the term ‘heterotopia’ will follow under the header of ‘Relevant Fields of Study’.

In this thesis I will discuss spatiotemporal aspects in detail (as space and time are the two most important aspects of a heterotopia), as well as taking into account more technical aspects of the comic strip such as narrative and form. Lastly, while discussing these aspects, it is important to explore if and how the heterotopia is betrayed in any way. For example, is imagination ever discouraged (see ‘Relevant Fields of Study’), or are there actors present that disturb the safe and protected space?

While scholars have already noted the utopic quality of Little Nemo (amongst others Scott Bukatman, who describes Slumberland as a “utopic space of exploration and discovery” (12) in his short essay, Little Utopias of Disorder) and have spoken about space and time (such as Katherine Roeder), both of which are essential in the discussion of the heterotopia, no research has been done connecting Little Nemo and the concept of the heterotopia, the existing, alternative space within society.

This research could be considered as socially relevant, as heterotopias are existing places which allow us to understand how space is utilised in our society, and thus comic studies might benefit from this study. By constructing a space that is distinctly different from all the other spaces in society, it is possible to gain insight on how space is usually utilised. As Foucault says, “we do not live in a kind of void … [but] we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites” (23). The heterotopia, then, does not exist by itself, but exists in a network of other spaces, and the heterotopia “contradict[s] all the other sites” (24).

6 RELEVANT FIELDS OF STUDY

SOCIOLOGY – FOUCAULT’S CONCEPT OF THE HETEROTOPIA

One of the main theorists whose work is crucial to understand this thesis is Michel Foucault and his work Des espaces autres (Of Other Spaces). Foucault begins his essay by distinguishing traditional/mediaeval space and modern space: the former is ordered in a hierarchical manner (e.g. profane places are considered as being less worthy than sacred places), and the latter is understood in terms of a network of relations. Foucault then distinguishes two types of space: internal and external space. According to Foucault, the space of our dreams is internal; it is a type of void with intrinsic qualities, such as being ethereal, or transparent. However, in this thesis I wish to clarify that when I speak of dreamspace, I mean to denote an external space that exists inside a set of relations: although the content of the comic represents someone’s internal space (Nemo’s), it is actualised (it is put into form, it exists) as an external space. The dreamspace consists not of dreams, but consists of Slumberland and all the places Nemo and his friends go to on adventures. The dreamspace as an external space can also be understood in a more literal sense: the material, physical comic is meant to be shared and is thus part of an external space, it is meant to be published and read. This will be discussed later on in this thesis, under the header of ‘The Space of the Page’.

Let us move to the crux of the matter. Foucault discusses a particular type of external space that I believe applies to Little Nemo: the heterotopia. Foucault defines the heterotopia as “an effectively enacted utopia”, a distinct, existing space in society that is ruled by a different sense of time (it is heterochronic, as will be explained in the chapter on time) and is subject to a different set of rules, different from all other spaces within society. In a heterotopia, the space has to be separate and has to share a certain type of relationship with the outside world. The experiences within the heterotopia deviate from everyday life, especially in terms of imagination: the space is considered alternative because it encourages and depends on imagination. Scholar Bart Keunen, in his book Ik en de stad published in 2016, writes that heterotopias are “spaces that go beyond the indifferent spaces with which we are confronted every day” (170 own translation). Without imagination, the heterotopia ceases to exist. One ought not to confuse the heterotopia and the utopia. Although they may share some elements (which is why I have mentioned the utopia and not other types of topoi), such as being an

7 ideal place, the main distinction between the heterotopia and the utopia is that the heterotopia is an existing place, unlike the utopia (ou-topia), the non-existing place (Keunen 170).

After having explored the difference between heterotopias and utopias, Foucault continues his essay with a list of six principles that characterise the heterotopia. Throughout this thesis, the principles will return and will be fleshed out in more detail. 1. There is probably no culture that does not have heterotopic spaces. 2. The heterotopia has a “precise and determined function within a society” (Foucault 25). An example is the cemetery, which serves as a “cult of the dead” (25). 3. The heterotopia is capable of containing several other, sometimes contradictory, sites in one space. 4. The heterotopia is heterochronic: it represents an absolute break with traditional time. Heterotopic time is either fleeting, or oppositely, reaches for the infinite. 5. The heterotopia “presuppose[s] a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (26). Entry to the heterotopia can be compulsory, or can be accompanied by rites and/or purifications. 6. The heterotopia has a function “in relation to all the space that remains” (27): it is either a space of illusion (it “exposes every real space” (27)) or a space of compensation (it creates a space that is “perfect” and “meticulous” (27)). In other words, although the heterotopia is alternative to all the other spaces in our society, it is real and is therefore part of our society. Heterotopias, consequently, have the ability to “represent, contest, and invert” existing sites in our culture (24).

COMIC STUDIES

Another theorist whose work will frequently return is Thierry Groensteen. His two works Système de la bande déssinée and the continuation Bande déssinée et narration (The System of Comic Books I and II), “the most important semiotic analysis of the medium published to date” (Beaty and Nguyen, vii1), will be referred to as System I and System II. Groensteen’s theory focuses mostly on formal aspects of comics, but can also contribute to more content- oriented research such as this.

1 Foreword of the translated System II by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen.

8 MODERNITY AND POPULAR CULTURE

Lastly I wish to mention Scott Bukatman and Katherine Roeder, both of whom have contributed insightful scholarship on the subject of Little Nemo. This supporting literature is used in this thesis to assist the analysis. Both works will frequently return: Bukatman’s The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit uses McCay as a guide- line figure to analyse multiple comic book characters. Roeder’s Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay, as the title suggests, studies the relationship between mass culture, entangled with fantasy, and the modern experience.

THE ARTIST: WINSOR MCCAY

Zenas Winsor McCay (Michigan 1867 – Brooklyn 1934) is a big name in the comic strip world. McCay was an illustrator and cartoonist, but also tried his hand at creating vaudeville shows and drawing posters for the circus. His most famous work, Little Nemo in Slumberland (published at three intervals – but this thesis will focus on the first part dating from October 15, 1905 to July 23, 19112), follows the fantastic adventures of a young boy named Nemo and his companions, Flip, Impy, and the Princess of Slumberland. His other most well-known works include Dream of the Rarebit Fiend and Hungry Henrietta.

The full-page weekly comic of Little Nemo is widely known for its splendid illustrations and attention to detail. A colour-printed version ran in the newspaper The New York Herald. After a long and difficult trek to the palace of Slumberland where the Princess awaits her new playing companion, Nemo and his friends travel to beautiful places such as the exotic ‘Candy Islands’ or the freezing North Pole; they journey on a zeppelin across the states of the USA and even reach the inhabited planet of Mars where citizens must pay for air and words. Week after week, the comic surprises the reader with innovation and playfulness. At the bottom right corner of the page, the comic unfailingly ends with Nemo waking up in the safety of his warm bed.

2 The collection I use for this thesis is a printed edition from 2016 by Kentauron Publishers, edited and proofread by Wirton Arvel. It contains an extra strip from the European edition and is available on Amazon.

9

In an anthology on the theory of the graphic narrative, Edward Shannon argues that the authors of the early comic strips act as pioneers and have an enormous influence on the ensuing production of comics, as well as graphic novels. McCay’s art is influenced by fantasy and surrealism, influences that will frequently return in the following century of comic strips (197). Katherine Roeder, who has written the masterpiece Wide Awake in Slumberland, echoes this line of thought. According to Roeder, McCay is the first artist to “fully exploit the comic strip’s potential for fantasy narratives” (46).

A BRIEF NOTE ON THE TERM ‘COMIC’

Due to various approaches of the definition of the comic, it seems appropriate to disclose how the term will be used in this thesis. Although Thierry Groensteen’s work revolves around the idea of comic books functioning as systems (for Groensteen, images in a comic are “multiple and correlated” (System I, 19) and are connected in a network through what he calls ‘iconic solidarity’), I will not be following this definition. He does however note that comics are a “predominantly visual narrative form” (System I, 12) and insists on the primacy of the image over text, rather than the widespread idea that comics are, in essence, a mix of image and text. I consider my focal point to be the image rather than the text.

Next to the difficulty of defining the term comic, many scholars engage in the discussion of whether or not the comic medium has merit and why it is awarded scant legitimacy. Apart from making a few notes on this point, this issue has enough subject matter to form a thesis or a doctorate in itself. A claim made by authorities such as universities, museums, or the media, is that the medium of comic is “infantile, vulgar, or insignificant. […] Comic art suffers from an extraordinarily narrow image, given the richness and diversity of its manifestations. Furthermore, its globally bad reputation jeopardizes the acknowledgment of its most talented creators” (Groensteen, A Comics Studies Reader, 3). Groensteen addresses the same issue in his work System II. A distinction is made between contemporary comics that contain an in- depth exploration of inner life and psychology, versus older comics that are considered as infantile escapism in which the characters lack depth (140). If one were to agree with these statements, talented artists such as Winsor McCay or the famous Richard Outcault would be dismissed as unimportant to the developments of the comic as a medium. The sheer number

10 of scholarship existing on these authors is enough evidence to prove otherwise. To give only one example: in A History of the Narrative Comic Strip, Jared Gardner gives a compact overview of the historical development of graphic narratives. He considers Little Nemo to be the first strip to “offer consistent characters in an ongoing, open-ended serial narrative” (242 – 243) and to explore the visual narrative in an important manner.

11 ANALYSIS

SPACE IN THE HETEROTOPIA

THE DREAMSPACE

When Foucault attempts to define space, he speaks of understanding sites/spaces in terms of a network of sites. One can only understand a space when it is placed in the larger context of multiple spaces, in which each space shares a relational position with other spaces (23). While discussing contemporary spaces, Foucault also claims that these spaces still have traces of sacredness, they are not wholly desanctified: in different terms, certain spaces can still hold traces of what people consider to go beyond the everyday, the profane; sacredness implies something that is deserving of respect and is not to be changed. Foucault names a few oppositions that are all marked by the “hidden presence of the sacred” (23), oppositions that remain “inviolable” (23) because they possess a certain degree of sacred value, oppositions such as the private space and the public space, or the cultural space and the useful space. This is very much applicable to McCay’s comic strip, as I will explain under the header below, ‘Imagination’.

IMAGINATION: A VITAL ASPECT OF THE HETEROTOPIC SPACE

Although the comic may have – mostly – been written for children, judging by its playful nature, McCay’s work also seems to garner attention from adults, as one might deduce from the scholarship dedicated to its analysis. In Little Nemo, the dreamworld – and childhood – seems to be an elevated space, almost sacred because of the imaginative possibilities that one associates with the mind of a child. Where in the comic strip do we encounter this imaginative possibility? Winsor McCay’s work displays a dream-like quality that is consistent with fantastic, imaginative possibilities: for example the many strange creatures the reader encounters, such as ‘The Wild Fuzzle Kip, a specie of the Goggle Mop, the Sand Eaters of Spizzengeek’, a strange four-footed creature covered in trees, (209 Kentauron); ‘A Pie-Faced Sciatica’, an angry-faced centipede, (211 Kentauron); ‘The Rubbernecked Bazzoo’, a zebra- like creature with an lengthy, knotted neck; a gigantic bird called ‘The Boob’ whose head is made of solid bone, an enormous worm called ‘The Warted Citron’, etc. (252 Kentauron). This dream-like quality is also present in the landscape, which continually changes, and the characters themselves, who seem almost ‘amorphic’, difficult to pinpoint: Nemo and his crew

12 are stretched and shrunk every which way, disguised as statues, disguised as each other, turned into icicles, de-aged, drawn as stick-figures, dressed in dozens of different outfits, etc.

This dreamworld has a unique quality that differs in relation to the space of the real world of most adults who have ‘lost’ this imaginative aspect of the child. Many people consider preserving childhood, innocence, and creativity as desirous. In Wide Awake in Slumberland, Roeder notes a fascination with the (Romantic) child – the Romantic child being the epitome of imagination. If one considers Foucault’s above-mentioned oppositions, one might place the dreamworld – the child’s world – in cultural space in the opposition between cultural space and useful space. It is not a far reach to place the world of adults in the useful space, as it is typically abound with pragmatism and rules to conform to society and to accomplish certain achievements as opposed to a child’s world. Think about dietary restrictions, for example: adults might choose to become vegan, thus making a choice belonging to the useful space (with a certain goal in mind, e.g. environmental reasons), whereas a child will never consider the environment in their food choices and would rather eat what they enjoy to eat, or leave it aside if they do not like it.

As is mentioned above, the imaginative aspect of the child’s mind, which one might place in the cultural space, is considered to be desirous by adults. This desire is mirrored in the explosion of children literature and illustration around that time period (late 19th century – beginning of 20th century). Think of Alice Through the Looking Glass, Peter Pan or The Wizard of Oz, to name a few. One way to visualise this creativity and imagination is through the genre of fantasy, and especially the motif of dreams. I believe that this is why this comic strip remains interesting to contemporary readers: it is full of imagination and creativity, two qualities we still hold in high regard today. The heterotopia, as has been mentioned before, contains idealistic values, aspects of society that are idealised – in this case childhood innocence and fantasy. To return briefly to the introduction of the thesis, I do not believe this imagination and creativity coincides with ‘infantile escapism’, which has a definite negative connotation, and lack of depth which the comic is often accused of having.

One more useful distinction can be made before moving on. While discussing the first principle of heterotopias (heterotopias exist in most cultures), Foucault offers two types of spaces: the crisis heterotopia and the heterotopia of deviation. The former refers to “privileged or sacred or forbidden places” (24) that contain individuals who are in crisis, such as

13 menstruating women, the elderly, or adolescents (e.g. military service or boarding school, spaces where “manifestations of sexual virility […] take place elsewhere than at home” (24)). Foucault reserves this type for primitive societies. The second type of heterotopia refers to places that contain individuals whose behaviour deviates from the societal norm (e.g. rest homes, psychiatric wards, prisons, cemeteries, …). Where would we place Little Nemo? Are Slumberland and the places Nemo and his crew visit places where individuals deviate, or are they places where individuals in crisis reside? I would place Little Nemo in the category of heterotopias of deviation, as they contain the individuals who deviate, in the sense that it is a space for grownups who temporarily abandon the adult world and retreat into the world of children.

To continue, it is useful to turn to Bart Keunen: “Heterotopias are social spaces in which individuals adopt a similar ‘innovative’ imaginative structure and thereby use space differently to those individuals who use space in a functional or utilitarian manner” (173 own translation). It is this aspect of imagination that is crucial for the heterotopia. It is also one of the main traits of McCay’s Little Nemo. The comic strip is filled to the brim with luxurious colours, a wide array of animals and plants, distorted architecture, experimentation with size, shape and form, an endless supply of richly ornamented costumes, etc. McCay’s artistic style is innovative and requires an imaginative and open mind to come up with new ideas to experiment with previously static elements of the comic: for example, McCay’s use of panel shape differs from his contemporaries. One needs to think differently in order to execute experimentation. Furthermore, McCay bombards the reader with ornamentation and decoration – which one could consider as being the opposite of utilitarian or functional.

Groensteen observes that the comic is a genre that relies heavily on the active participation of the reader: the comic is full of holes, which are ‘filled’ during the reading experience, due to its sequential form (System I, 10). Here it might be worthwhile to make a small digression to reception aesthetics; Wolfgang Iser and his theory on gaps. Scholar Julia Round reasons that comic readers become partial-authors seeing as they add narrative information that is not shown between the panels: these are the ‘gaps’ (96). To further elaborate her point, Round uses Wolfgang Iser’s narrative theory: the reading experience rests on the dialectic between the reader, the text and their interaction. And, Round stresses, this is especially the case for the medium of the comic book, where the reader has an active role in creating a linear and coherent narrative from an otherwise “static, fragmented page” (97) – thus the story exists

14 through the reader. Though Iser spoke of strictly textual narration, I believe his theory can be applied to the comic. According to Iser, gaps render a narrative ‘richer’ because it involves a greater degree of (cognitive) participation of the reader. The gap, the unwritten – or in this case, the visually non-depicted – is what makes a literary text literary. Are there many gaps in Little Nemo? Or are the stunning images and bold colours delivered on a silver platter that does not require any further input? When reading McCay’s work, it becomes clear that there are gaps in the text: there is no sound or dynamic movement, only the illusion of it. Your mind supplies this information. Not only is there no sound or movement, there are literal, physical gaps in the text: the gutters (the blank spaces between the panels). Groensteen claims that the gutter is a site of “semantic articulation”, a site wherein a series (the panels) gradually constructs a statement “that is unique and coherent (a story)” (System I, 114). The gutter is not an image in itself, but is a space in which the reader can construct gradual meaning of the story by the progression of the panels. This gradual construction of meaning can be compared to Iser’s continual modification and horizon change. In this sense the medium of the comic itself requires the imagination of the reader, which is integral to the heterotopia. I have discussed a first characteristic of the heterotopic space; it encourages imagination. A second characteristic is the presence of limitations and rules.

The heterotopia is a space that is partly isolated in which the individual must obey certain rules. Keunen speaks of rites, rules, and interdictions (176-177). This is easily applicable to Little Nemo: one can only enter the realm of Slumberland by falling asleep and the main rule of this kingdom is that the dreamer must not wake up. When Nemo registers to enter the royal palace, he is met with a secretary who tells him, “Be good and true! Be brave! And, by all means, do not wake up!” On his desk a large plaque announces, “OUR MOTTO, DON’T WAKE UP,” (Kentauron 22). Throughout Nemo’s attempts to reach the palace of Slumberland, he is constantly thwarted by the presence of Flip or other disturbances that startle him to the point of awaking. I should note, however, that this interdiction is only explicitly insisted upon in the episodes of the first year of printing.

THE DIALECTIC OF HOMELY AND UNCANNY

Throughout the entire comic strip, it is clear that Nemo is often frightened. When his parents are not reprimanding him for lazing in bed or making a fuss while he is dreaming restlessly, they frequently have to soothe him, for example when he has a bad dream in which Flip and

15 he are about to get shot by the palace’s army: “Nobody is going to get hurt Nemo, no one is going to shoot. No, no, go back to sleep dear,” (59) or when Nemo is scared that he has grown into an old man, “You are all right dear, mamma’s here. You were only dreaming” (13). In The Poetics of Slumberland, Bukatman argues that the comic strip succeeds in both presenting the imaginative potential of a child’s mind, but also the child’s experience of space, the latter of which is twofold: on the one hand space is a place of the homely (Heimlich), but on the other hand it is a place full of dangers, of the uncanny (Unheimlich) (Bukatman 96). I find this dialectic of homely and uncanny appropriate for Nemo’s experience of the dreamspace. He encounters strange and unknown places, abound with rich fantasy, which sometimes frightens him, but he ultimately always finds his way back home safely in his bed.

In fact, many, if not most, of the episodes in the comic strip follow a similar pattern: something positive (often met with wonder or pleasure) turns into something negative (the situation becomes tumultuous and Nemo gets frightened), and Nemo is saved by waking up in his familiar bed. For example, on page 158 of the comic strip, Nemo, Impy, and Flip enjoy some ice cream before they freeze into icicles. Nemo is then placed near a stove and melts into a puddle before he wakes up in his bed.

In this sense, one could argue that Little Nemo contains elements that betray the heterotopia: no longer is the space exclusively protected and safe, but rather, it also comprises dangers that scare the protagonist.

THE SPACE OF THE NEWSPAPER – THE ‘FUNNIES’ SECTION AS A HETEROTOPIA

Apart from the dreamspace, I wish to analyse the more concrete, material space of the newspaper itself. Bukatman explains that the full-page comic strip acts as a “brief interlude” (1) in the wider space of the newspaper. In this sense, he argues that the Sunday supplement, or the ‘funnies’ as they are sometimes called, acts as a playful interlude in the larger, more serious newspaper, in this case The New York Herald. The reader is transported to a different world through McCay’s “innovative spatiotemporal manipulations” (1) (I will speak more on the temporal aspect of the comic later).

16 The distinction between the innovative and playful world of the Sunday supplement on the one hand, and the more serious world of the entire newspaper on the other hand, is mirrored in what Gaston Bachelard refers to as the irreality function and the reality function: Bukatman uses Bachelard’s terms and applies them to these two worlds. The space of the comic uses the irreality function (it is grounded in playfulness and imagination), and the space of the newspaper uses the reality function (it is grounded in a ratio and information) (7). Bukatman praises the irreality, the plasmatic aspects and the animatedness, of comics and cartoons. He praises the childish, often even mischievous image.

When considering the irreality and reality function, one is reminded by what Foucault considers to be the second principle of heterotopias: these spaces have a “precise and determined” function within a society (Foucault 25). Foucault himself gives the example of the cemetery, which, in an atheistic age in modern civilisation, has become a place for the “cult of the dead”, a dark, resting place (25). What is the function of Little Nemo as a heterotopia? It seems to me that, as it is grounded in playfulness and imagination, the space as it is used in the comic serves as a place of reprieve from the more serious side of life (more will be explained in the chapter on modernity).

THE CITY: A SPACE OF IMAGINATION OR CONTROL?

It is not unusual to see comics and the city intermingle. As André Suhr writes:

“When early “comics” appeared in newspapers for the first time, this coincided with the pinnacle of cultural modernity in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, a time which finds its paradigmatic locus within the modern city. The parallel evolution of the modern city and comics is not a purely spatiotemporal coincidence — newspapers and thus comics were in fact a medium primarily located in cities” (231).

Although I consider the main heterotopia in Little Nemo to be Nemo’s dreamworld in general, and more specifically Slumberland, another frequently recurring space within the dreamspace or dreamscape is the city. Most episodes of Little Nemo take place in Slumberland, not in the city. In this sense, Slumberland is recognisable as a heterotopia because it offers an “alternative to the ills of modern life” (Keunen 171). Note, for example, how Slumberland’s architecture is traditional, not sleek and modern like in the city. Many heterotopias use a separate space to protect themselves from modernity, of which the city is the epitome

17 (consider for example the conservative heterotopias of the gated community in suburbia, e.g. The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin. In this conservative space, all elements from the boisterous city are kept out of the community – the space is in this sense conservative, as it isolates all traditional aspects of life and disallows any and all modernising, and supposedly dangerous, elements). As noted by Jörn Ahren and Arno Meteling in their introduction to the anthology Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence, modern comics are “inseparably tied” (4) to the city, especially as the allocated space in newspapers for comic strips expanded, and thus the space reserved for the city expanded, too. Ahren and Meteling mention McCay and his whole page, where he could create “fantastic worlds and real cities” (4). Little Nemo does not shy away from using the urban site. This might lead one to believe that Little Nemo cannot be considered as a heterotopia, seeing as how heterotopias are often spaces that protect themselves from modernity. However, it might be an interesting question to explore whether the city is a space of control/restriction. Is it a constrained space or a space that allows imagination, or perhaps both?

In his essay “Every Window Tells a Story: Remarks on the Urbanity of Early Comics”, which is part of the above-mentioned anthology, Ole Frahm uses Michel de Certeau’s work L’invention du quotidien to introduce the analysis of the panoramic view of a city (32 – 34). Certeau argues that the panoramic view seems to accord the viewer a sense of control over the city and what goes on inside it. As the city becomes more and more complex in a time of modernity, because of industrialisation and urban conglomeration amongst other things, in this total view of the city (the “panoptic project”), the city appears to be “clean and unified, and thereby transparent” (33). However, Certeau counters, this sense of control is an illusion: by taking a step back and having a total view of the urban area, one inevitably overlooks change on a smaller scale. A walking passerby on the street, then, witnesses more of the city than the panoptic viewer. The walking passerby witnesses the strangeness and turbulent incoherency of the city, and the panoptic viewer witnesses the clean, “swell of verticals”, that is, skyscrapers, “as a unified surface” (33).

Little Nemo contains three important sequences (multiple episodes) on this subject that I wish to discuss: the first presents the case of the total view offering control, the remaining two manage to play with the tension between a panoptic view and a more detailed look. For every sequence, I have chosen one episode to accompany the analysis.

The first sequence starts at the beginning of 1911. Nemo and his crew embark on a zeppelin

18 and travel far and wide. They encounter a number of cities such as New York, a fictitious city on Mars packed with building blocks and skyscrapers, Boston, Montreal, Quebec, etc. In this sequence the reader rarely gets to see details of the urban area, instead skylines and endless rows of houses crowd the page. Sometimes the cities are recognisable through a landmark, for example Lady Liberty in New York or Old South Church in Boston, but otherwise they remain somewhat anonymous and interchangeable. The reader has a sense of control over the view. Does this reflect McCay’s fascination with the city, or does he use this limitation as a conservative tool to keep the busy city at bay?

The second is a sequence from 1904, in which Nemo, Impy, and Flip escape a forest after being chased by red giants, and end up in a miniature city where they are as big as the buildings themselves – perhaps the city has not shrunk into a miniature, but Nemo and his companions have grown into building-sized behemoths themselves. Frahm himself also comments on this sequence. Though we do not see an overview of the city – Nemo and co climb over and in between the buildings – the gaze remains limited. So while the reader is in fact acting as a walking passerby because our gaze is directed at individual streets and not a total view, the gaze remains limited because Nemo is lost amongst the overpowering size of the – identical-looking – buildings. Frahm writes, “The panoptic gaze must have a higher position than everything else – it is only at this position that it achieves its power [of control]” (39).

In the third sequence on which I wish to comment, the opposite is true: no longer does the reader enjoy a total and clean view of the city, but the reader dives headfirst into the busy and bedraggled streets of ‘Shanty Town’ (sequence from 1908). Nemo first catches sight of Shanty Town and exclaims, “What a ramshackle city!” (Kentauron 131). He proceeds to walk around the streets and encounters many ailing and destitute inhabitants who leave their tenements to see this curious, beautifully dressed boy. Nemo then takes them on a tour of Shanty Town and, by using his magic wand, shows them how he would like to reform the city: from a decrepit county jail surrounded by weeds and a crumbling street to a church surrounded by white flowers and a large, fine boulevard. There is an obvious element of imagination present. And although McCay shows the gloomy and chaotic side of the city, as opposed to the distant and almost anonymous panoptic view, he still expresses a desire to be rid of the befouled and heterogeneous elements of Shanty Town by turning it into a clean, wealthy and problem-free area. McCay returns to the safe and controlled space that is in some

19 ways protected from the disorder of modernity. It seems that McCay uses a combination of imagination and limitation in the urban space.

20 Fig.1. From the online public archive, http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/633, 8 Jan. 1911

21

Fig.2. From the online public archive, http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/388 , 22 Sept. 1907

22

Fig.3. From the online public archive, http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/456, 5 April 1908

23 SPACE AND MODERNITY

In the previous section the following question was posed: is the city a place of control or imagination? When speaking of the city, it is impossible to not speak of modernity, as the two are closely interlinked. For a brief illustration of this statement, I will turn to Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts Into Air, in which he dedicates a chapter to New York City. He writes that the architecture of the city can be considered as an expression of modern times, as the gargantuan buildings are symbols of modernity (289). Among these buildings and monuments, he cites the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Manhattan’s many skyscrapers, all of which are featured in Little Nemo (Kentauron 227) right before Nemo and his crew prepare a tour of the “big cities of this country” (Kentauron 269). In this following section I will take a closer look at how the background of modern times influenced the comic strip, and more specifically, how this relates to the heterotopia concept.

THE NEWSPAPER

In the anthology by Jörn Ahrens and Arno Meteling, “Comics in the City”, we find the following:

“[Part one of this anthology] examines the historical background of the fundamental connection between the rise of comics and urbanity. The origins of this new kind of media are to be found in the emergence of mass societies and mass cultures at the turn of the twentieth century, especially in the context of modern newspapers” (7).

As Little Nemo was published in modern newspapers, it is appropriate to consider this context in our analysis. One can ask the question, why is the newspaper important in light of modernity? The newspaper is a medium that can be considered as a cultural carrier, a medium that stands for modernity, for example in terms of the success of modern technology (the printing machines). Note that many newspapers are distributed in city capitals and metropolises (e.g. The New York Times founded in 1851, The Washington Post 1887, The Boston Herald 1846), the hotbeds of modern times. Roeder comments on the audience in relation to the newspaper: newspapers “became less urban and culturally specific so as to appeal to a larger audience” (59). By becoming less culturally specific, the medium had the possibility of appealing to multiple strata of society. This is also the reason why there was an

24 attempt to legitimise the ‘funnies’; so that the newspapers garnered more readers. Roeder argues that Nemo and Flip represent different strata of society (middle class and working class, respectively), which would be a strategy employed by McCay to increase his readership by representing and involving both classes (60-1). To reiterate, the newspaper became part of mass culture, it became a tool to reach a wider, mass audience. One must not forget that the rationale behind this trend is strictly economic. By appealing to a larger audience, the newspapers collect more revenue.

MASS CULTURE AND IMMERSION (1)

When reading McCay’s work, it becomes clear very quickly that the artist was inspired by the mass media surrounding him (for a long period he lived near Coney Island in the state of New York). Winsor McCay worked as a vaudeville writer during his younger years. Vaudeville is a type of theatre consisting of “short and attention-grabbing” stories (Roeder 19), notorious for their rapid pacing, slapstick humour, experimentation, and constant renewal – it is therefore a uniquely modernist art form. Roeder links several different media; film, comics, and vaudeville, as they shared many similar traits, such as the constant renewal that was necessary in order to grab the recognition of a mass audience with a short attention span. Modern times are characterised by a certain frenzy, a surplus of stimuli which confuses the modern individual – it becomes necessary, then, in order to be noticed, to stand out in the midst of a busy ‘plateau’, as it were. Scholar Thierry Smolderen, discussing the work of William Hogarth, mentions the ‘swarming effect’ (5): on an image with many things happening all at once, the effect is that the viewer almost does not know where to look, for example images of fairs or carnivals, where one will surely find this surplus of stimuli. This seems very applicable to McCay’s work, which is full of detail and colour; every rich tone and swirl of the brush is striking and grabs the reader’s attention. Smolderen uses the verb ‘immerse’ to describe how a viewer reacts to an image using the swarming effect.

Many critics have spoken about immersion when discussing modernity, for example Angela Ndalianis, who writes that, due to evolving technology in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, people have undergone a shift in perception: our perception has grown more frenzied, more ‘kaleidoscopic’. She cites Bukatman, who explains, “Kaleidoscopic perception – which operated through a combination of delirium, kinesis, and immersion – […] was fundamental to the rhetorics that surrounded the modern metropolis, and it was endemic to

25 such urban entertainments as phantasmagoria, amusement park rides, and, perhaps most paradigmatically, the cinema. The city was presented as a chaotic tumult of activity and sensory bombardment” (247). According to Ndalianis, these shifts in perceptions are reflected in the comics of that time. One need only look – not even read – Little Nemo to recognise that ‘sensory bombardment’ is an apt description of McCay’s style. I will return to the effect of immersion in the chapter on formal and stylistic aspects.

To continue, we will look at three specific sites that have heavily influenced the urban landscape, are closely linked to the modern experience, and have impacted McCay’s work: amusement parks, the circus, and the department store.

MODERN ENTERTAINMENT AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE URBAN LANDSCAPE

Before analysing the three sites (the circus, amusement parks, and the department store), I wish to quote D. Graham Shane, who points out that Foucault mentions “fairgrounds, markets, arcades, department stores and world’s fairs, the showplaces of capitalism and global production,” (263) when analysing the concept of heterotopias. Foucault’s sixth principle entails that a heterotopic space serves a certain function in relation to all other spaces in society, and this function is either one of illusion, or compensation (Foucault 27). The spaces Shane has cited serve the first function, as they expose “every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory” (Foucault 27). Keunen does not use the term ‘illusory’, but instead opts for ‘transgressive’: these spaces stand for “illusion and the fulfilment of all desires; they offer the possibilities of subversion, heterogeneity, and excess […] and in these semipublic spaces, the individual realises particular desires and dreams” (Keunen 188-89, own translation). Seeing as the sites of the circus, the amusement park, and the department store are heterotopias of illusion, I will examine how these spaces are used in Little Nemo, and I will analyse the heterotopic potential of these three sites.

The Circus

As well as being a vaudeville writer, McCay designed advertisement posters announcing the (railroad) circus during the late 19th century/early 20th century. In order to become and remain successful, advertisement and promotion was necessary. As a rule, to appeal to the modern audience, these posters had to be eye-catching and bold, and were by nature fleeting as they

26 quickly made space for other posters. The main attraction of these posters – along with the exotic animals displayed, such as elephants, tigers, monkeys, etc. – was the bold colour palette that makes them so memorable. The advertisements enjoyed the perks of technological development such as mass printing and commercial printing (Roeder 80). Roeder examines the similarities between circus posters and McCay’s work, and even though there is rarely a direct link or physical evidence, the similarities and echoes are undeniable. Not only do McCay’s drawings echo circus posters, but certain episodes contain examples of the actual circus. The circus, just like the amusement park, which is discussed in the next section, is a place filled with music, noise, colour, and movement, wherein the transgressive aspect of the heterotopia of illusion is underlined. It is indeed, just like Keunen wrote, a place with the possibility for subversion and heterogeneity (Keunen 188-89). The following example will clarify the likeness between the two forms of printing: posters and comic panels (the first page contains examples of circus posters, the second of panels from Little Nemo):

1 2

27 1 Fig.4. See sources. Circus poster by Winsor McCay ‘Silas’ for New York Hippodrome, from 1908 2 Fig.5. See sources. 3 Fig.6. See sources

3

Fig.7. Detail. Inhabitants of Slumberland walk by during a parade announcing the Slumberland Princess. From Public Internet Archive https://archive.org/stream/LittleNemo1905- 1914ByWinsorMccay/little-nemo#page/n139/mode/2up. 14 June 1908

28

Fig.8. Detail. Nemo and the Princess on their way to visit the King of Slumberland. From Public Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/LittleNemo1905-1914ByWinsorMccay/little- nemo#page/n49/mode/2up 1906 Sept. 30

Apart from the poster by McCay himself, I have chosen different examples than those given by Katherine Roeder; however, the parallels are very clear. There are comparable colour combinations (bold hues, very often primary colours are combined; red, blue, and yellow), surface patterns (stripes, dots, …), subject matter (the exotic animals, clowns, suits and ornate costumes with top hats and coattails), and typography. Although I have only given one example of the title ‘Little Nemo in Slumberland’, which features in each weekly comic, the title changes colour almost every episode. Especially in the first year of publication, McCay experimented with different ways to insert the title in the comic (amongst others embedded in a heart on Valentines Day, written on banners, walls, curtains, panels, written straight or in a curve, in two big circles, etc.). The lettering from the titles stands out and bears a striking resemblance to the typography used for the circus posters – yet again marked by the excess that is characteristic for heterotopias of illusion/transgression.

29 Amusement Parks

As I have mentioned before, McCay lived near Coney Island for a number of years. The experience of the rides on Coney Island, must have given visitors new sights and experiences: a panoramic view of the city was now offered to the public. Echoes of this experience are found in McCay’s work, as these panoramic views opened a new way of arranging space in comics. The very long sequence on the zeppelin, in which Nemo and his crew board an airship with the task to find Doctor Pill, by the King’s orders as he is suffering from gout and needs a doctor, takes Nemo and his companions all over the northern hemisphere of America. The reader is frequently presented with a panoramic view from above, showing a scenic sight of many cities, their coasts and their famous buildings, much like one would experience on rides such as the Coney Island Wonder Wheel (1918), the Coney Island Cyclone (1927) and the tall Parachute Jump (1939).3 Though these examples are anachronistic for then readers of the original publishing of Little Nemo, later enthusiasts might have noticed the similarity. The first amusement park on Coney Island was called the Sea Lion Park, and was opened by Paul Boyton in 1895. It held famous rides such as the ‘Shoot the Chutes’ slide, the first every looping railway called the ‘Flip-Flap Railway’ and offered numerous other aquatic-themed activities. Below is an example of a panoramic view from the airship in Little Nemo:

Fig.9. Detail. From the public internet archive, http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/640. 26 Feb. 1911. A coastline view of Pittsburgh.

A novel development was the payment of an entrance fee, which, according to a website celebrating Coney Island’s past, was a practice Boyton had witnessed at P.T. Barnum’s

3 See sources for website

30 famous circus. 4 Roeder writes: “[…] comic strips offered viewers visions of fantasy and magic unbeholden to the laws of nature. Yet the circumstances of its production, distribution, and consumption were indelibly tied to the twentieth-century market economy” (107) Although the experiences suggested the fantastic and the unimaginable, the adventure was rooted in the economic system. Just like the newspapers, both the circus and the amusement parks settled into a capitalist tradition. While one could, to a certain degree, mimic the thrills or envision the views of the rides, the comic – and the newspaper it appeared in – was acquired by paying a sum of money.

Roeder also points to another type of ‘ride’ that features in Little Nemo, namely the funhouse, which one could also encounter in amusement parks. The clever and innovative sequence ‘Befuddle Hall’ in Little Nemo bears much resemblance to the funhouses: the sequence plays with mirrors, both multiplying the characters and elongating or contracting their bodies, and disorients the characters and readers by making the Hall spin a full 360 degrees. Although I have chosen only one image as an example, it does not do justice to the playfulness and imaginativeness of the entire sequence, which consists of eight memorable episodes. Keunen argues that we use heterotopias of illusion to escape “harmful and powerful illusions of everyday life”, such as work ethic (189). The playful and even carnivalesque nature of this Little Nemo episode attests to this aspect of the heterotopia of illusion.

4 See sources for website

31

Fig.10. From the online public archive, http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/438, 2 February 1908

32 Department Stores

The third space I wish to discuss is equally rooted in the economic system; the department store. It is important to remember that although heterotopias are spaces that are separate from all other spaces in society, they still function within that society – and are therefore part of its economic system. As we have seen for the circus and the amusement park, Little Nemo also echoes this third modern space. Modern times experienced a rise in department stores, and the window displays especially acted as attention-seekers to lure in customers. Similar to today’s American malls, the department stores acted as sites of entertainment, not merely sites of economic activity. Discussing the rise of the passive-consumerist modern experience, Keunen writes that these department stores have over time become shopping malls that are increasingly entertainment-oriented, today not only offering shops but also, “cinemas, tropical swimming pools, skating rinks, and other recreational possibilities” (Keunen 85, own translation). Keunen concludes that whereas department stores of the twentieth century still contained an element of aestheticisation, today’s shopping malls have lost this ‘mythological aspect’ and offer strictly a passive, escapist, and consumerist experience (85). Little Nemo still holds on to the aesthetic value of these department stores.

The displays of the department stores were decorated according to the golden ‘rule’ of abundance, full of pattern and decoration, detail and pomp – they are perfect examples of how heterotopias of illusion are characterised by excess. There is a similarity between department store interiors (and window displays) and museums or world fairs of that imperial period: crowded displays, tall columns, chandeliers and light fixtures (Roeder 127-28). In other words, grandeur is part of culture, which also returns in Little Nemo. Note for example the grandeur on the following panels of figure 11, with the grand edifices, the explosion of artificial light, the ceremonial banners, and the royal garb.

33

Fig.11. Detail. From the online public archive, http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/200, 1 July 1906

A very important economical development from this period, the end of the 19th century/early 20th century, is the growth of the market targeting children (Roeder 130). By opening the market to children, revenue increased. As Roeder writes, commerce was “surcharged with romantic and poetic atmosphere” (132) as to appeal to the masses, much in the same way that Little Nemo appeals to all ages. By combining commerce with entertainment (or a romantic and poetic atmosphere), it becomes all the more easy to entice (potential) customers. Advertisement and window displays were of paramount importance, as these were the channels through which to reach customers. Before moving on to the discussion of the heterotopic potential of these three types of spaces discussed above, I will show one more example of a panel in Little Nemo inspired by the busy window displays of department stores, figure 12. The rows upon rows of colourful dolls, tambourines, and horses surely must have appealed to children. It is in fact Santa’s palace, and Icicle, Santa’s helper, exclaims that it is all free, “Help yourself to all you want! It’s free!” – whereas the adult reader, knowing Santa Claus’ presents actually come out of their own pocket, knows better. Icicle attempts to

34 convince Nemo to move on to Slumberland after having witnessed the splendour of the palace, but as the caption 10 informs us, “Nemo contented himself with seeing the sights” (Kentauron 11). This scene is very reminiscent of ogling children staring at window displays full of glittery and exciting toys, also singled out by Roeder (130-31). The readership – including children – is encouraged to participate in excessive consumerism. Although excess is typical for a heterotopia of illusion, one might ask oneself whether or not consumerist excess is painted in a positive or negative light by McCay in this episode: despite the fact that Nemo is encouraged to grab toys and eat candy, he does neither and instead is content to simply look around, much like a modern flaneur. Is McCay telling his readership not to partake in the consumerist frenzy? If so, is this not hypocritical, as newspapers – and therefore the comic itself – are also part of the consumerist economy? In the following section, I will examine in how far McCay goes along with ‘the status quo’.

Fig.12. Detail. From the online public archive, http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/122 , 17 Dec. 1905

HETEROTOPIC POTENTIAL OF MODERN ENTERTAINMENT SITES: CONFIRMING THE STATUS

QUO, OR CRITIQUING IT?

It is no coincidence that McCay uses a great deal of sites of mass culture in his comic: these three sites that I have commented on, the colourful and exciting circus, the diverting and bustling amusement parks, or even the luxurious and packed window display of department

35 stores, all have heterotopic potential, in that they offer –especially to adults – a brief interlude from daily life, which is overall governed by more or less rigid societal rules. All of these sites have one aspect in common: they are separate entertainment sites, built around the act of engaging viewers and participants in a type of show, much like the pages of Little Nemo.

On the one hand, these modern heterotopic sites are positive: they provide the reader with the illusion of adventure contained in a controlled environment, such as a reader sitting comfortably on a couch (116-17) – this echoes the earlier dialectic of homely and uncanny mentioned in this thesis. The modern sites offer a playful space, a fun reprieve from serious, daily life, where I would label space ‘useful’, to re-use the distinction I had made before – imagine, for example, a Wall Street broker on their way to work on the train, reading the New York Herald. After reading the political news, the economic news, etc., if they wish, they can delve into a childlike world of wonder and entertainment in the ‘funnies’ section. But on the other hand, these sites are not completely innocent. There are some elements that betray the heterotopia, namely the economic interest that drives these sites. It seems that the heterotopia is contradictory in nature – on the one hand, the other space stands for a deviation of societal norms, but on the other hand, it adheres to the societal norm of participating in the system of profit-based capitalism. Foucault explains that the heterotopia can be a space that “represent[s], contest[s], and invert[s]” (Foucault 24). These spaces can be paradoxical: although this space is different from all other spaces in society, it is still part of this society, and therefore cannot help but adhere to certain rules – for example the rules of capitalism. The words ‘nothing is ever free’ seem to ring true. The heterotopia is not free, and the goal of these essentially capitalist enterprises is to gain profit.

As this research attempts to analyse Little Nemo and its potential as a heterotopia, it is of reasonable worth to look for moments in Little Nemo where McCay conforms to the status quo – namely, the capitalist endeavour of gaining profit – or actively rebukes it. I will discuss three subjects; holidays, the cardboard valentine, and planet Mars. Firstly, McCay participates in what I call ‘holiday frenzy’, which is tied to the publication of comic strips in newspapers. He has drawn multiple episodes for the 4th of July, the national holiday celebrating Independence Day in the States, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas, and New Year’s. Roeder notes that children were especially targeted by the market around holidays, especially during Christmas (133). McCay features well-known figures like Santa Claus, and Jack Frost to

36 further appeal to the young public. In this sense, he sticks to the status quo and uses the celebrated and highly commercialised events of holidays to broaden his readership.

Secondly, there is the subject of the cardboard valentine. In this case, McCay shows the downside to the capitalist endeavour. Compare the figure 12 (containing a departments of Santa’s palace filled to the brim with toys) with the following panels from an episode celebrating Valentine’s Day: Cupid displays a row of life-sized valentines, which Nemo gets to choose from. Much like figure 12, the first panel resembles the dolls that were aligned in the window displays and, just like in real life, a child got to choose a toy. Nemo, however, gazing at the dolls with an open mouth, does not realise that his valentine is not a real ‘Pretty Little Maid,’ but in fact a cardboard cut-out. The caption from the eight to the tenth panel announces, ‘It was not until he proceeded on to Slumberland that he discovered Cupid was a cheat and that his valentine was merely tinselled paper.’ (Kentauron 19). McCay paints Cupid – and perhaps Valentine’s Day in general – as a cheat.

Fig.13. Detail. From the online public archive, http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/139 , 11 Feb. 1906

The most compelling argument for a capitalist/consumerist-weary McCay however, is to be found in the sequence in which Nemo and his crew visit the planet Mars. In a world where more and more elements of our life are turned into a commodity – think, for example, of

37 religious paraphernalia such as candles and prayer beads being used as hip accessories – one might go so far as to say that our belief is not spiritual or religious, but capitalist. McCay was certainly aware of this trend, as he shows on his planet Mars. The planet has been commodified to the point where its citizens are required to pay for things that cannot rationally be commodified, such as air and words. It seems ludicrous, but that might just be the point McCay wishes to make, namely that our habit of commodification is getting out of hand. Soon, McCay jokes, we will even have to pay for the air we breathe and the words we speak. The sequence remains humorous, as there is some truth in the madness. McCay is also very aware that money equals power in our world. As Mr.Gosh’s assistant says (Mr. Gosh is the ruler of Mars), “Rich folks can talk, the poor must keep still.” (Kentauron 239). If you are silenced, you cannot voice injustices, and seeing as only the wealthy are able to speak, Mr. Gosh has very effectively created a tyrannical, supremely capitalist system. As Roeder rightly notes, planet Mars shows “the dangers of unchecked consumption and corporate power” (150) – on Mars, everything is owned by Mr. Gosh, or more accurately, by the corporation ‘B. Gosh & Company’.

Another commodity on planet Mars is sunshine – it cannot reach the depths of the large buildings, so it has to be saved in a storage plant, and is then used as daylight. The poorest people of Mars live in the lower parts of the city, and therefore are not privy to natural sunlight – it is reminiscent of dark and crowded slums. When Nemo and his crew wish to enter the plant, the reader can see a – intertextual (Dante) – plaque announcing, ‘ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER WITHOUT THE PRICE’ (Kentauron 246), suggesting one must pay to enter, and again alluding to the fact that sunlight is something one must pay for. Right before entering, with an airship full of poor people who have no light due to a power outage and who wish to go up in the air to receive light, Mr.Gosh’s assistant says, “We’ll dump these people and I’ll show you the pretty part of Mars! They’ll get arrested for being in the real sunshine! Yep!” (Kentauron 245). McCay does not paint an all too positive image of the planet of Mars and its social hierarchy: there is a strict divide between poor and rich. The heterotopic quality of the comic is disturbed, as the reader is confronted with aspects that, despite being drawn in a colourful and playful manner, echo the harsh realities of our existing world. In the case of Planet Mars, McCay does not confirm the status quo, but instead critiques it: here, the heterotopia is critical of the normalised space.

38 From these examples, one can understand that, despite participating in commercial ruses, such as Valentine’s Day, and in a market with an economic structure (the newspaper he works for), McCay is very much aware of his position and is not hesitant to voice his critique of the society he lives in. The heterotopia may appear idyllic on the surface, but if one examines these modern spaces more closely, it becomes apparent that they are not without their dangers and tricks.

39 TIME IN THE HETEROTOPIA

As we have seen in the previous chapter, the way space is utilised in heterotopias is of paramount importance as the name itself, containing topos (space), suggests. The fourth principle of Foucault’s heterotopia touches upon the way time is defined in heterotopic spaces. Although time is considered separately in a principle, it should be noted that Foucault accentuated the importance of time next to space: “it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space”, he writes (22), and it seems, therefore, fitting to accord ‘time’ as much attention as ‘space’. Heterotopias are characterised by their heterochronic evolvement of time, meaning that these spaces experience a “sort of absolute break with their traditional time” (Foucault 26). Traditional time, in this case, funnily enough, means the time that dominates the society of that era: modern time. The opposition here is not traditional time versus modern time, but traditional time (being modern) versus heterochronic time. Traditional/modern time is marked by the ideology of progress and expansion (territorial, imperial, economic, etc.). Heterochronic time is diametrically opposite: it is fleeting and transitory, which is completely opposed to the modern credo.

Foucault distinguishes two types of heterochronic spaces: on the one hand, there are spaces that are fleeting or transitory in nature – they evolve constantly, they are “time in the mode of the festival” (26) – and on the other hand, there are spaces that reach for the eternal – an accumulation of time, such as one might experience in libraries or museums. To continue my research of Little Nemo, I will analyse to what degree time can be considered as heterochronic, more precisely the first type of heterochronic time: fleeting/transitory/constantly evolving/exciting. (One could also argue, however, that the time one encounters in this comic is an eternal accumulation of time: Little Nemo was published for years on end with intermittent breaks, spanning over a period of more than a decade). Firstly we will look at the ways in which the heterotopia is ‘betrayed’, the ways in which the comic is repetitive and therefore, as I call it, ‘homochronic’, and secondly we will seek out counter examples: heterochronic experience of time in the comic. As has been mentioned before, heterotopias are reliant on innovation and imagination. By encouraging heterochronic experience of time, McCay continues and deepens this activity of innovation and imagination.

40 ‘HOMOCHRONIA’

STORY ARC

Josh Lambert, in his essay on intertextuality and cliff-hanger continuity in early comic strips, writes that McCay actually goes against creating suspense at the end of every weekly episode, by faultlessly returning to the safety of the home (8): without fault, the last panel of every strip on the bottom right-hand corner of the full page depicts an awakened Nemo in the large and comfortable bed of his home, sometimes in a state of fright, sometimes relief, or even disappointment at being taken away from the pleasant dreamworld. Lambert states that McCay “deliberately undercut[s] the tension built up in the dream narrative” (8). Most of the episodes follow the same pattern: safety – adventure – danger – return to safety. According to Groensteen, some places in comic strips, or sites as he calls them, enjoy a ‘natural privilege’, such as the upper left corner or the lower right corner. Many comic artists are aware of these sites and make use of it, for example by positioning key moments of the narrative in the first and last panel of the page, thus creating a type of rhyme or loop, which Groensteen recognizes as the effect of braiding (System I, 29–30). Especially in the beginning episodes of the series, McCay uses these ‘naturally privileged’ sites to frame the narrative: either the title page or the first panel, in which McCay sketches the circumstances of a sleeping Nemo or he recapitulates a troubled encounter between worried characters in Slumberland searching for Nemo, and the last frame, in which Nemo awakes. Both of these naturally privileged sites, the first and last panel, almost unerringly contain a safe space, which might serve as an indication as to how important (the return to) safety is in Nemo’s universe.

A short example of tension building up (adventure and danger) and being interrupted by an abrupt return to safety is the following: in an early episode of Little Nemo of October 7 1906, the princess invites Nemo to take a drive in a car that ‘runs itself’. The two passengers drive down a slide that makes a 360° loop (much like a roller coaster), and Nemo is clearly not feeling at ease, asking her, ‘Is there any way of stopping this and letting me out?’ and just as the track stops in the middle of the air – the car flying into the sky and Nemo crying out ‘Oh! Oh! Eh! Wha! Who! Oh!’ while the Princess comments, ‘Isn’t this just grand, Nemo, eh! Beautiful?’ – Nemo brusquely awakens after yelling out in his sleep (Kentauron 53). Commenting on a particular episode from Little Nemo, wherein a row of palace pillars slowly morph into a forest of trees (home to angry-red giants chasing after Nemo and his crew),

41 Shannon also notes this repeating pattern of danger and safety: “One of the recurring motifs in McCay’s rendering of the dream world is the panel-by-panel transformation of the world around Nemo. Often, as is the case here, a place of security slowly becomes a place of danger and mystery” (194).

Here I would like to return to the afore-mentioned dialectic of the homely and the uncanny: familiar places and objects or places that present no danger, in this case the brightly-lit, innocuous pillars of a royal palace, have the tendency to mutate into places or objects that cause Nemo distress, in this case a gloomy forest filled with fearsome giants. There is another episode that makes use of the dialectic between the homely and the uncanny extremely apt (fig. 14). The first panels show the idyllic scene of Nemo and his crew (with a new member called the Professor) fishing on a riverbank, after which they take a stroll through town with Professor’s pet dog. Flip remarks that their surroundings start to resemble the drawings he makes, and soon the animate actors of the strip are transformed into stick-figures, or as Nemo calls them, ‘bad drawings’. The changing style of the illustrations renders the familiar world unstable and strange. McCay’s style changes from a wide array of colours and detailed drawings to primary colours and stick-figure dolls – a change which the main character experiences very palpably: Nemo is no longer familiar with the home he once lived in, which now consists of a few crude squares and triangles, exclaiming, “How queer our house looks! I’m getting frightened!” (italics mine). While his parents, having been distorted into amateurish child-like sketches, do not find anything amiss, Nemo cries when he does not recognise his mother and father, and when he looks down at his own body and sees that it repeatedly changes in appearance. Across the whole comic strip, Nemo often experiences fright at an altered state of his surroundings or a nightmarish set of chaotic events, and wishes to return to his parents. In this episode, and in many others as well, McCay plays with the fear of losing hold of what is most familiar to us: the home. The dreamworld seems like an optimal choice to explore this. Not only is the content of the comic strip (the recurring plot of safety – adventure – danger – safety) used by McCay to explore this dichotomy of the homely and the uncanny, but style is as well.

42 Fig. 14. Nemo walks home to find his parents unrecognisable. From the Public Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/LittleNemo1905-1914ByWinsorMccay/little-nemo#page/n185/mode/2up 1909 May 3

43 READING EXPERIENCE

As mentioned above, the plot of each episode in Little Nemo is more or less of the same nature. It follows the pattern of safety – adventure – danger – return to safety. One might ask, then, as a reader, in how far the experience of time is truly imaginative and heterochronic. Is your imagination truly at work if you are, without fault, guaranteed a return to safety? Is this not a case of homochronic experience of time? Another point which I would like to consider when discussing the reading experience is the comic strip as a physical object:

In the version readers get to read Little Nemo nowadays, the strip is presented on a double page, simply because the episodes are bound in one larger work. However, the original readers of the late 1900s and early 1910s read the comic on one large, full-page format in the Sunday supplement of the Herald. It is likely, then, that Winsor McCay did not take into account the double page layout and its possible implications for the depicted episodes, such as colour or the ‘effect of interweaving’ as Groensteen calls it (System I, 35). Compare, for example, how a story is built and drawn in a graphic novel versus a weekly comic strip. The comic strip is conceptualised serially, and though each episode was published a week later, the content of the episodes do not always continue the content of the preceding week. A graphic novel, however, is bound in one larger work. Depending on how a reader or viewer reads the comic, a once-a-week-thrill or a continued reading of a bundle, the level of anticipation and excitement experienced by the reader might vary. For example, the first reading takes a total of at least six years, whereas the second way of reading it can last only a few days or weeks, depending on how eager a reader one is – but could also last months or longer. It does seem to me, however, that when one is presented with the bundle version as opposed to the newspaper version, the repetitiveness of the plot comes to the foreground, and might therefore be characterised as a more homochronic than heterochronic reading.

Regardless of whether or not one reads the newspaper version or the bundled version, it may be of use to consider the nature of the reading experience of a comic in itself: while you read Little Nemo, you are momentarily transported into another world, despite still being physically tethered to the real world. Certain reading experiences can confirm the reality you are living in, such as a newspaper article about the weather or the review of a speech from a politician – these are real life events that correspond to what you are reading. By contrast, there are reading experiences that fulfil an entirely different function and transport you into

44 another world, such as works of fiction or a comic strip. In this sense, the latter type of reading experience is much more heterotopic than the former, as it is an alternative way of reading to the dominant or usual one – an information-based, utilitarian manner of reading, that seems to be more in accordance with ‘traditional time’, as was mentioned in the beginning of this chapter.

SPEECH – LANGUAGE IN LITTLE NEMO

The last part of this section on ‘homochronia’ will examine speech in Little Nemo. Gabriele Rippl and Lukas Etter write that (quasi)surreal plots work especially well without verbal cues, and in making this statement, they mention Little Nemo (211). Though I do not disagree with their statement – that panels without verbal elements/cues work especially well in graphic narratives with a (quasi)surreal plot, think for example of the wonderful work of Moebius – it comes to a bit of a surprise that Little Nemo is mentioned as an example. The vast majority of panels in the comic strip contain verbal cues, and there is quite some theory to dissect in relation to speech. For example, McCay uses what Groensteen defines as ‘the orality card’, which “multipli[es] the effects of “natural speech” (elisions, incomplete or incorrect phrases, familiar or trivial expressions, phonetic transcription of accents given to characters, etc.)” (System I, 129). McCay uses speech that is not literary but instead informal and recognisable. While discussing ‘the orality card’, Groensteen also mentions the term idiolect – one’s personal dialect, their own quirks and linguistic patterns. A person’s idiolect makes their speech recognisable. For example, in Little Nemo, there is Impy’s garbled ‘language’ of grunts and squawks, Flip’s tongue-in-cheek, and Nemo’s innocent utterances of wonderment. One notices very soon as a reader, however, that the speech these characters use is extremely repetitive and might even be labelled as ‘empty chatter’. The vocal cues include many repetitions, fillers, exclamations of wonder, and interjections. Do the characters ever say anything of real importance that plays a role in the content of the comic? The first few weeks’ worth of episodes contain a type of authorative ‘voice-over’ at the bottom of each panel, an extradiegetic narrator who informs the readership of the workings of Slumberland and who Nemo is.

Could the strip have done without the – often inconsequential – chatter? The answer is most likely no, as it would seem odd to have no verbal interaction between the characters. If there were no speech in Little Nemo, it would be difficult to read for children, and the comic strip

45 would more closely resemble an actual dream: the space of Little Nemo is a dreamworld — do we usually remember precise verbal utterances from dreams? Does a dreamworld need speech, being of an illusory and immaterial nature? Perhaps for an individual experiencing a dream, there will not be any uttered speech during the dream, but in this case we have a physical comic strip page and an existing, corporal reader – both of which might prefer a narrative with speech as opposed to an ungraspable and silent dream.

While speech plays a role in determining the characters’ idiolect, and thereby is a tool of characterisation, the language used by these characters seems rather repetitive and increases the homochronic nature of the comic strip. There are rarely, if ever, any surprises to what Nemo and his crew have to say. Linguistically, the comic offers little innovation. McCay’s work is not known for its linguistic richness, but instead for its visual impact. Here we might turn to Miodrag, who argues that there is a “radical heterogeneity of visual signification” to comics and graphic novels, “which subsumes an array of different codes such as size, color, texture, and location, very different to language’s finite pool of like units” (10) Following her train of thought, it is the ‘visual language’ that is more malleable and important, more heterogenic – and perhaps therefore has the ability to be more heterotopic/heterochronic?

Despite the argument that there ought to be a stronger focus on the visual than on the linguistic, there is room to make an argument for the heterochronic nature of McCay’s choice of speech. McCay uses a particular type of speech that takes the reader away from the real world – and thus transports them into another world: there is a certain type of speech that grounds you in the here and now, in real life, for example, ‘I am now reading this sentence in my office.’ This type of speech is realistic and situated. This coincides with language that is employed in the majority of the newspapers articles – serious, situated language. McCay’s speech, in the ‘funnies’, however, is the polar opposite: by using ‘empty’ and ‘inconsequential’ chatter such as enunciations of wonder (see Nemo’s excessive use of ‘oh!’, ‘hum!’, etc.), the reader is not situated in a particular real situation connected with a real life situation, as would happen with most newspaper articles, but is instead placed in a ‘stateless’ state of wonder. The reading experience of the Wall Street broker reading the New York Herald on the train on their way to work is derailed by this alternative language: this is a complete break with traditional time, and is therefore more heterochronic than our daily use of speech. After all, what could be less modern and focused on progress than empty, playful speech of wonderment?

46 HETEROCHRONIA

PANEL LAYOUT

The previous part of this analysis argued that there is a notable amount of repetitiveness in Little Nemo, which goes against the heterochronic aspect that characterises heterotopias. Katherine Roeder has taken note of this repetitiveness too but argues that despite repetition of certain elements, McCay experiments with form (which will be discussed in the chapter on formal features) and “thinks inventively about the comic strip medium” (22). McCay explores the medium by addressing the readers and evoking the fourth wall (e.g. see figure 14 where Nemo says, “I’m leaving before the artist changes me into a bad drawing”, underlining the character’s knowledge of their fictionality). Another excellent example of McCay’s exploration of the medium is the following figure wherein the frames of the panels are transformed in order to correspond with the (meta)narrative:

Figure 15. Detail. From the Public Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/LittleNemo1905- 1914ByWinsorMccay/little-nemo#page/n161/mode/2up. 1909 Nov. 8

More importantly in this discussion on time, is that McCay not only rethinks the medium itself but also rethinks the notion of time by exploring movement and playing with the size and content of image. Roeder writes,

“Close- ups and long, panning images are used both to add visual interest and to enhance the temporal qualities of the comic. Panoramas extending the width of

47 the newspaper page slow the momentum of the story and allow contemplative space in which the reader can pause and reflect, while the fast-paced zooms of superhero comics interject speed and dynamism into the flow of the narrative” (“Seeing Inside-Out the Funny Pages” 25).

We have already encountered a few examples of panoramas, amongst others on figure 3 and 9, which indeed ‘slow the momentum of the story’, as Roeder puts it. Inversely, ‘fast-paced zooms’ accelerate the narrative. In her work on comics and language, Hannah Miodrag establishes the same trend of speed typical for superhero comics with her analyses of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Metronome by Veronique Tanaka (Bryan Talbot): “the increased number of panels creates a feeling of acceleration” (121) in the strip. However, by “breaking [an] action down” (121) in smaller parts or panels, the movement is actually prolonged. She explains that this zoomed-in movement across multiple panels actually accelerates reading time, not narrative time. A famous example of a slowed-down visual representation of movement, which has also been analysed by Roeder, is the first episode of the comic, depicting Nemo on a galloping horse, each panel a photograph, as it were, of the horse in motion – no doubt inspired by Eadweard Muybrigde’s chronophotograph of a horse in motion. Little Nemo contains countless examples of movements that are slowed down in time, amongst others there are his bed falling apart, his bed transforming into a chariot, trees transforming into ostriches, a snowball rolling down a hill and growing in size, Nemo freezing into an icicle, a passing royal parade, an elephant approaching the reader, etc. An iconic passage from the comic (figure 16) is the one where Nemo’s bed grows ‘legs’ and walks around the city. The hyperframe (a term coined by Groensteen to indicate the entirety of all the frames on one full page) consists of several sizes and shapes of panels, of which there are sixteen in total. The movement is slowed down enough so that the reader can vividly imagine what the moving bed looks like. Judging from Nemo’s and Flip’s sprawling bodies, a reader might deduce that the movements of the bed are brisk, brusque and clumsy. This episode perfectly depicts the evolvement of time by visually representing movement in detail. Figure 17 shows the opposite: it is an episode with a very different panel layout. There are only five panels, and movement does not seem to be of much importance in this episode. Reading time accelerates while narrative time decelerates.

48

Fig.16. From the Public Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/LittleNemo1905- 1914ByWinsorMccay 1908 July 26.

49

Fig. 17. From the Public Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/LittleNemo1905- 1914ByWinsorMccay 1906 August 5.

50 (IR)REGULARITY

Now I wish to turn to Groensteen’s second volume on comic theory, in which Groensteen discusses rhythm and regularity in comics. The theorist argues that a comic contains a certain rhythm, one that is built by the succession of panels (System II, 147). Groensteen uses the term ‘beat’ to describe a first element of rhythm: two panels on one full page make a slow beat, multiple strips or bandes with multiple panels make a faster beat (System II, 151). Little Nemo is not restricted to a strictly slow or fast beat, instead containing multiple examples of either speed. Groensteen adds that a ‘regular beat’ coincides with a ‘gauffrier’, or a ‘waffle- iron’ layout, in which a single panel shape and size is repeated throughout the entire page. The advantage of this layout is that it creates a situation in which the reader becomes receptive to meaning-making, according to Groensteen (138–9). Earlier in his theoretical work, he analyses the degree of regularity in comics, meaning panel layout dependent on number (or bandes or strips), height, width, and density (number of panels in total). Groensteen writes that irregularity, which is the opposite of the ‘waffle-iron’ layout, has a certain destabilising effect on the reader (System II, 43-45). In Little Nemo, however, the deliberate choice of irregular panel layout might be helpful to further emphasise the dreamworld, instead of having a negative effect, as the connotation of destabilising suggests. McCay continuously plays with the visual and narrative possibilities within the full-page surface. The artist is a pioneer in his sector because he was the first to break the waffle-iron norm of that time. The bending and breaking of norms is thus thematically linked to the theme of dreams: dreams are full of possibilities and odd rules, and can be said to have their own sense of rhythm, their own sense of time.

‘Funnies’ are usually quick and short. Maybe Little Nemo is a bit different, due to its full-page layout, and the ‘fullness’ of the panels (the number of elements a reader can absorb in this highly-detailed comic is higher than in your run-of-the-mill minimalistic comic, for example). Reading time is sometimes slow, sometimes fast, depending on many factors, such as the frequency and size of panels, the number and ‘fullness’ of space balloons, etc. In this sense, it coincides with the heterotopia’s heterochronic experience of time.

51 TEMPORAL MAPPING AND STASIS

We have briefly looked at the panel layout and (ir)regularity in Little Nemo to establish the heterochronic nature of McCay’s comic. Another discussion point is to be found in Bukatman’s work: Bukatman explains that one of the main aspects of Little Nemo is that the dreamworld is temporary, which is typical for heterotopias, as they are a sort of break from the ‘real world’. The dreamworld transports the reader to a different spatiotemporal dimension, and it allows the reader, for a little while, to escape the rigid confines of the real world (1-2). In other words, the temporary or fleeting nature of the dreamworld makes the dreamworld heterochronic.

Bukatman praises McCay. “With Little Nemo McCay demonstrated an unprecedented (some would say unmatched) mastery of temporal mapping while returning to the spatial solidity and scenic richness associated with artists like Hogarth” (34). Put differently, McCay combines movement (across the panels, ‘temporal mapping’) and stasis (the individual panel, ‘spatial solidity’) while producing wonderful artistry.

Previously mentioned Angela Ndalianis also discusses stasis and movement in comics in general, and argues that the medium of the comic book itself is heterochronic in nature, as comics, despite not being kinetic, contain movement:

“The comic book form is anything but static. The panels that litter its pages are riddled with a dynamism and motion that presents its own unique articulation of time and space. Some of the narrative action represented within a comic book panel can ‘freeze’ time, but other panels – while remaining visually static as still images on a page – open up complex depictions of time and space that create modes of perception that are particular to comics. The comic represents the animated flux of time and space through stasis” (237).

Like Bukatman, she stresses the movement through time in a comic, where a visual leap across the gutters equals a leap in time (241). Unlike Bukatman, Ndalianis adds that an individual panel can also contain movements, for example by adding speech balloons in the panel, which she claims “marks movement through time and space” (241). Both Ndalianis and Bukatman specify that movement and time in comics published around the turn of the century

52 are characterized by a type of “visual frenzy” (Ndalianis 238), or a kaleidoscopic perception, a combination of “delirium, kinesis, and immersion” (Ndalianis citing Bukatman 247). Comics are, in other words, very heterochronic in nature.

To conclude, we ask the following question: is there adventure or boredom in Little Nemo? Repetition or innovation? Technically there is an endless amount of adventure in the comic. It is also an aesthetic feast for your eyes, there is imagination and creativity aplenty, but the speech is repetitive and empty, and if you read Little Nemo in one go, as opposed to a weekly series, it becomes a little tiresome: each adventure in Slumberland, while innovative in form and imagination, follows the same pattern of excitement/wonder – danger – waking up. Despite the weekly repetitive plot of Little Nemo, these reasons cited above argue that the comic can be regarded as heterochronic and not homochronic. As Arthur Lubow writes, although the narrative content of Little Nemo is “juvenile and jejune”, “it is difficult to imagine a better medium to convey the queer sense of time in a dream. With dizzying panache, McCay played with the possibilities” (13).

53 IMMERSION INTO THE HETEROTOPIA: FORMAL AND STYLISTIC ASPECTS

FORMAT AND IMMERSION (2)

It is perhaps misleading to dedicate a separate chapter to formal aspects of the comic, as these meld with other aspects so seamlessly. Not to mention that a few discussion points have already been mentioned in the previous chapters, such as immersion and the waffle-iron grid. Just as with the two previous chapters on space and time, we will ask the question whether or not the formal aspects of the comic contribute to the establishing of a heterotopia, or if they somehow invert the heterotopia.

To start the formal analysis, I will turn to a short quote by Katherine Roeder from “Seeing Inside-Out in the Funny Pages”: “ever since the [comic strip] was initially codified in the late nineteenth century, artists have used the unyielding format of the funny papers as a challenge rather than a limitation” (24). One could argue that Winsor McCay can be considered as one of these artists that take up the challenge of an ‘unyielding format’, rather than accepting it as a limitation. The one element of Little Nemo that is completely original – Thierry Smolderen points out a resemblance in the earliest Little Nemo episodes to French work published by Maison Quantin, Images Enfantines, in terms of colour scheme and structure – might be McCay’s page composition, which Smolderen describes as having an “ever-changing kaleidoscopic layout” – note the continued use of bold colours and the continuously changing shape, size and number of panels, reminiscent of the mechanics of a kaleidoscope (157). Figure 20 on page 60 is a good example of kaleidoscopic panels. Other theorists, as well, have pointed to McCay’s page layout as being the element that makes his work unique, such as Edward Shannon, who speaks of “visual innovation” and “ambitious page design” (197, Shannon) that will later have influence on artists such as animator Walt Disney and illustrator Maurice Sendak known from Where the Wild Things Are.

Groensteen rarely mentions specific examples of McCay’s work, but as has been said in the introduction of this thesis, his work focuses on formal features rather than content. It is of no surprise then, that Groensteen’s theory is used in this chapter. One of the important terms in his scholarship is the ‘hyperframe’, the entirety of all the frames used on one single page of a comic strip/graphic novel/etc., or as Jörn Ahrens defines it, the “composition of the page as a

54 mega-panel in itself” (Ahrens 216). Each comics page, then, constitutes a hyperframe. One might consider it as the ‘skeleton’ of the page. Groensteen writes,

“In Western culture reading respects an unchanging direction, which moves from the left to the right. When the comics page respects the classic division of generally watertight horizontal bands (“strips”), it imposes on the panels an alignment that facilitates the sweep of the gaze” (Groensteen System I, 47).

In other words, comics artists often draw their stories using a waffle-iron grid wherein the “dynamic of action submits to the imagined movement of the gaze” (Groensteen System I, 48). Groensteen gives the example of Hergé, who draws a character running from left to right, which is visually easier to absorb than a character running from right to left. McCay, then, is innovative because he does not submit action to imagined movement of the gaze: the alignment of his panels changes constantly, his hyperframes continue to change from week to week, and rarely follow the strict waffle-iron grid. It is clear that McCay paid much attention to the single page that was available for his weekly strip, which is evident the variations in panel size, shape, and number (e.g. the above-mentioned difference in number of panels between figure 16 and figure 17). The two most significant examples of mesmerising hyperframes are the two episodes in which a large circular panel dominates the page: the episode with the central panel of an open-mouthed moon, and the previous episode containing the same hyperframe, this time depicting a giant turkey eating Nemo’s house in the central panel (Kentauron 8 and 9). At times, the lack of a strict grid can be slightly disorienting for the reader: it shakes the reader awake, because it forces the reader to adopt a different way of reading through an unconventional layout. Groensteen describes ‘braiding’ as a way of creating a network within comics. It is “generally founded on the remarkable resurgence of an iconic motif (or of a plastic quality)” (System I, 151). The lack of a strict grid – the lack of a resurgent iconic motif – discomposes the network that is established. McCay, however, was always careful to stamp each panel with a number, so that a clear order was established.

One can argue that McCay’s formatting encourages an immersive or embodied reading. Immersion has already been mentioned in relation to modernity and what Smolderen called the swarming effect. What exactly does immersion mean, however? What is an embodied reading? The term ‘immersion’ is often used in regards to videogames or virtual reality, as (3D) movement plays a big role in the immersive experience, but the term can also be applied

55 to indicate immersive fictional reading. Anne Mangen defines reading as a “multi-sensory activity, entailing perceptual, cognitive and motor interactions with whatever is being read” (404). Both body and mind interact with the fictional text: the activity is embodied, the experience is immersive. While it might be easier to understand how fictional style can be immersive (consider for example the famous story To Build a Fire by Jack London in which a man freezes to death on a journey in an excessively cold environment, and the abundant mention of verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc. that contribute to an immersive reading experience, as they pertain to bodily experiences, such as temperature, movement, etc.), formal aspects can also be considered as contributing to the degree of immersion of a text. To illustrate this point, we will examine an episode of Little Nemo (see figure 19) wherein Nemo’s Uncle Alex does his morning exercises. The background of a home gymnasium morphs into a circus tent, and eventually into an arctic sea. The first ‘strip’ of panels ‘takes place’ when Uncle Alex and Nemo are both standing firmly on the ground – notice that the strip here is very regular in shape and size, and is strictly horizontal. As soon as Uncle Alex climbs up on the pull up bar and then makes use of two gym rings – as soon as there is a lot of body movement –, the format of the panels start to change. Uncle Alex swings back and forth with Nemo standing on his shoulders and swinging from his arms. These back-and-forth movements mirror the panels, moving from left to right and each frame horizontally descending, much like a swing or the pendulum of a clock. Note that the eyes of a reader follow the same movement. In this case, the immersive and embodied format guides the reader and, I suggest, ‘protects’ them against disorientation.

Marco Caracciolo, specialised in narrative theory and embodiments writes the following: “readers infer and keep track of narrative-internal events as they engage with textual cues: the story is the dynamic result of this interpretive activity” (50). While this relates to written text, it can be extended to the visual-linguistic medium of the comic strip (Caracciolo himself analyses two works in this article; one short story by Edgar Allan Poe, and a film by Tom Tykwer). In his article, Caracciolo explains that readers not only respond to the world within the story (e.g. characters and spaces), but also respond in a (physically observable) bodily manner to the way in which this world is “represented by discourse” (50) – note that in the case of Little Nemo ‘discourse’ aligns with visual-textual cues of the comic medium. In other words, the reader adopts an embodied manner of reading. According to Caracciolo, rhythm plays an essential role in the coming about of the bodily response to reading: as a discourse pattern can take on “quasi-musical, rhythmic qualities”, a certain kind of movement can be

56 produced in the mind (51). I think figure 19 is a perfect example of the efficacy of (visual) rhythmic discourse and how this can bring to mind a certain type of movement, specifically the pendulum-like movement of the swing.

Fig.19. From the online public archive, http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/633, 4 Feb. 1906

57 The two examples I have previously mentioned in relation to intriguing formatting, the two episodes with the large circular panel in the middle, also comprise this immersive and embodied element: the panels are somewhat overwhelming in their size as they dominate the page, which is manifest in the content of the story. In both cases, either being gobbled up by a gigantic turkey or arriving at the entrance of the colossal moon, Nemo is frightened at the immensity of these figures and attempts to flee while crying out for help. It is not uncommon for McCay to use large-sized panels when drawing big animals, strange planets, or enormous buildings. The larger the panels, the more successful this all-encompassing effect is on the reader. The final panel of each episode depicts Nemo in his bed – often his body reflects the bodily experience he undergoes during his dreams. The next example (figure 20), reminiscent of the Villa Volta ride in the Dutch park De Efteling, shows this perfectly. Nemo falls on the floor of his bedroom in the exact manner as he falls on the floor in Befuddle Hall. This little detail might seem insignificant, yet most of us will probably have had a dream in which we, for example, wake up with pain in our arm while we dreamt of being bitten by a dog in the arm, or wake up with an alarm blaring in our ear while we dreamt of alarm bells ringing. This element of recognition furthers the immersive and embodied experience: Karin Kukkonen explains that the reader is transported across the page in a comic just as the characters are transported on the surface of the page (58-59). More specifically, the body of the characters as arranged in the panel layout (indicating movement) can engage the reader’s body. Kukkonen uses the metaphor ‘transport’ to indicate the moment when we cognitively ‘enter’ the storyworld, when it becomes part of our ‘here and now’, our deictic centre (56). – this immersion is not whole, of course. As a reader, you are still tethered to your actual here and now, for example sitting at a desk reading this thesis. The point is, according to Kukkonen, that one better understands a concept by placing yourself in the situation, an ‘embodied simulation’ (60). Certain aspects, then, such as formal features, can induce a more immersive and embodied experience.

What does this mean for the heterotopia? Is modern society critiqued in any way? Is the heterotopic potential of the story reinforced through formal aspects of the page? To the former question, the answer seems to be no. The latter to the latter is more interesting. I would argue that an immersive and embodied experience aids the heterotopia in coming about: the more a reading experience is immersive and embodied, the more a reader is open to the contents of the story, perhaps even open to be swayed by the messages it contains – we cannot claim to know whether or not Little Nemo contains messages, be it political or social, but it does not

58 seem a fault to assume that McCay encourages creativity, imagination, and playfulness. By experiencing the content of the comic as ‘intimately’ as possible, the heterotopia is given the chance to express itself as clearly as possible. Just as I have written about the ‘here and now’ in the sections on ‘Reading Experience’ (p.44) and ‘Speech’ (p.45), the immersive and embodied format conducts the reader into another world and manages to momentarily suspend the reality the reader finds themselves in. Therefore McCay’s choice of format drives the reader to enter an alternative world, a heterotopia.

59

Fig.20. From the online public archive, http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/446, 1 March 1908

60 STYLE AND IMMERSION (3)

In a chapter from Hannah Miodrag’s work Comics and Language, entitled “Style, Expressivity, and Impressionistic Evaluation”, the scholar examines stylistic aspects such as “line and brushwork, light and shadow, texture, mass, order, proportion, balance, and pattern, as well as figures and composition” (Miodrag citing Adams, 198). In doing so, she demonstrates that involving formalist art criticism is just as valuable to comics’ analyses as ‘literary’ theory to write about theme and narrative (198). Her analysis could be useful for McCay’s comic, as his work is visually impactful, mostly due to its extravagant, loaded style: he works with proportion, composition, and pattern. One captivating example of how style influences theme is the episodes in ‘Befuddle Hall’, an impressive sequence wherein Nemo and his crew are mirrored, replicated, stretched out, and turned upside down just like in a Funhouse. Via style, the reader is transported or immersed into the world of playfulness, more specifically the circus – which as a theme has already been discussed in the chapter ‘Space’.

Cortsen and La Cour present another work of scholarship in which style and theme is connected. They discuss the work of Hornschemeier, Mother, Come Home, which is drawn with “sombre tone and colouring” which leads to a “subtle critique of the loneliness of individualistic society” (114). By way of contrast, one might argue that Little Nemo is inherently opposite: there is no ‘gentle colouring’ of ‘sombre tone’, and the entire comic in fact seems to thrive on bright hues and striking colour contrast in order to recreate the hustle and bustle of amusement parks, shopping malls, and the like. It might not be a far leap to reason that the McCay’s style is chosen aptly to reflect its content and theme.

To continue, we will turn to Groensteen. In System I, he makes the distinction between a ‘narrative drawing’ (the type of drawing that is found in comics, and is ruled by five concepts: anthropocentrism, synecdochic simplification, typification, expressivity, rhetorical convergence) and ‘illustrative drawing’, which “makes great sacrifices toward a decorative tendency and calls for a more contemplative reading” (163). Groensteen explains that comics can successfully incorporate illustrative drawings, and can even completely discard of linear drawing (164). McCay makes excellent use of the illustrative drawing in Little Nemo, playing with “surfaces and colours, lights and intensities” (164), while still offering highly imaginative narrative content. It is not unimportant to forget the importance of colour print, which was relatively new at the time. Jens Balzer notes the importance of four-colour printing

61 (especially succeeding in establishing a yellow that would not fade or discolour – think for example of the Yellow Kid from Down Hogan’s Alley by Richard Outcault, published in the New York World around the turn of the twentieth century), as bright colours draw in the viewers/readers (21). Little Nemo certainly is more striking due to its vibrant colour palette.

This brief chapter on stylistic aspects follows the chapter on formal aspects, because the two aspects overlap, namely in creating an immersive effect into the comic. To give an explicit example, Bukatman writes:

“McCay’s malleable panels, deployed across the broad canvas of the tabloid page, enhance the sense of immersion, through which the reader participates in Nemo’s spatial adventures and through which a kind of “tactile vision” emerges, with the eye almost caressing the richly detailed objects on display” (90).

Bukatman employs the words ‘malleable panels’ (format) and ‘richly detailed objects’ (style) to describe McCay’s work. According to Bukatman, his work is not only visually immersive, but tactilely as well: Little Nemo is drawn in such a way that the reader is immersed to the point of almost being able to touch the riches of Slumberland. Elsewhere, Bukatman points out that Little Nemo is drawn in such a way that “one does not just read [it], or look at it; rather, one falls into it” (80). Using Walter Benjamin’s “A Glimpse Into the World of Children’s Books”, Bukatman discerns the value of colour in children’s books; it creates “gluttonous, sumptuous images which [feed] the imagination” (76-7). Put differently, it creates a world in itself, which, as I have pointed out before, is essential to construct an alternative space, a heterotopia. The effect of the vibrant colours in combination with the full- page format engulfs the reader into the richness of Slumberland. The techniques used by McCay are successful in capturing an audience – and transporting it to an alternative space, a heterotopia – that is overwhelmed by the frenzy of the modern world, which is continuously vying for its public’s attention.

CRITICISM

Despite the sizable amount of scholarship dedicated to McCay’s oeuvre, there are some dissenting voices that question the importance of his work. Bukatman cites Bill Watterson,

62 known for Calvin and Hobbes, who writes, “McCay’s pictures are fancy, but they lack either whimsy or guts. His palaces, cityscapes and boulevards are sterile facades, and his Art Nouveau line keeps everything at and decorative. Slumberland, like its inhabitants, is more surface than substance” (93). Bukatman counterclaims that Art Nouveau does have substance in its style. Amongst others, it seems, in a way, to counter the urbanized decor of the city by infusing it with patterns and motifs found in nature. This is typical for Art Nouveau, by which McCay was heavily inspired. Bukatman offers a few formal, essential characteristics employed by McCay, such as “the sinuous line, the whiplash curve” (94). And of course Little Nemo, apart from the urban and architectural influences, also shows abundant use of flowers and plants, such as roses and carnations, the palace decorated by shrubbery, pillars turning into trees, trees morphing into animals, exotic leaves in the jungle, swirling sea waves, etc. Unlike what Watterson suggests, I argue that there is substance in McCay’s style – more than that, the style is the substance.

63 FOR WHOM DOES THE HETEROTOPIA EXIST?

THE ‘OTHER’ IN THE HETEROTOPIA

Foucault dedicates a few paragraphs to the accessibility of the heterotopia. “In general,” Foucault writes, “the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public space” (26). While some spaces require rites and purifications to enter, such as the hammam, the sauna or the church (think of hygienic or religious acts), other spaces function with compulsory entry, such as a prison. Foucault mentions a third type of spaces which, despite having easy access and being “pure and simple openings”, “generally hide curious exclusions” (26). He gives the example of sleeping arrangements in farms in Brazil and other places in South America, where travellers were free to settle for the night, but did not have access to the family quarters. The travellers were “guests in transit” (26), but not actual invited guests.

By asking the following question, we might discover who is the invited guest (or reader), and who is a guest (or reader) in transit: for whom does the heterotopia in Little Nemo exist? Who is the target audience? As has been mentioned before (p.25) by Roeder, two of the main characters, Nemo and Flip, represent, respectively, the middle and the lower class. These incarnations of class were adopted in the hopes of garnering a larger, mass readership. Furthermore, the level of difficulty of the comic strip – narrative or otherwise – is of such a level than any person of any age can enjoy it. Overall, it seems as if the space of Little Nemo is freely and easily accessible to anyone – all but one large and significant group, that can be labelled as the ‘Other’. This Other has one significant characteristic in common: they are not white.

Derek Royal, quoting Will Eisner, writes that the comic medium is highly coded medium that relies on “stereotyping as a way to concentrate narrative effectiveness” (7), unlike, for example, film, wherein characters have more time to develop. He continues:

“In comics and graphic art there always is the all-too-real danger of negative stereotype and caricature, which strips others of unique identity and dehumanizes by means of reductive iconography – the big noses, the bug eyes, the buck teeth, and the generally deformed features that have historically composed our visual discourse on the Other” (28).

64

In Little Nemo, this ‘Other’ is an ethnic subject who fails to receive a proper identity as visual tools are employed to reduce outward appearance into systemic alikeness. One will note that Flip is also stereotyped through his language and his outward appearance – take, for example the similarity between Flip and Impy’s facial features such as big lips and red clown nose. Shannon explores Flip as an ‘Africanist’ character, whose true racial identity is obscured through his green face paint. He writes, “Flip, the cigar-smoking, green-faced, jive-talking troublemaker and black sheep of the family may well be seen as the black voice that accompanies Impy’s black face” (200). The most indisputable example of the Other is surely Impy, the jungle imp and lovable, mischievous character that ends up on Nemo and his crew’s boat when they visit the Candy Islands. Flip says, pointing to a timid Impy, “Here’s the party who tried to steal me! Now he belongs to me!” (Kentauron 93). Note that Flip has captured Impy in a wooden crate and is placing him like cargo on a ship, recalling the practice of slavery (Roeder 70). Impy turns out to not be reserved at all, but a misbehaving child who likes to steal Flip’s top hat and cause trouble.

Impy, as he is first introduced, is not distinguishable from the other jungle imps, who on the whole represent a caricature of the Other: big lips, red noses, ethnic dress, unruly hair, and red earrings, beaded necklaces, and golden bands around their arms. Some imps speak English, amongst others the chief – who, while on the subject, is the only one who differs from the other imps in size – but some of them, amongst others Impy, speak gibberish. Note, first of all, how Impy’s name lacks any individualism – he is an imp, and so his name must be Impy. Secondly, Impy is stripped of the ability to express himself, to be a human participant in the story, as he cannot actually converse to the same degree the other characters can. Much like an animal he can only produce sounds we cannot understand. There is another group of Others on the Candy Islands who speak gibberish, but they are separate from the rowdy but innocent jungle imps (figure 21 shows us the jungle imps and the chief welcoming Nemo and his crew). These other inhabitants all have a darker skin tone, and are drawn as cannibals (figure 22 show us the other inhabitants hastily running away from the cauldrons in which they have placed Nemo, Flip, and the Princess). It seems somewhat telling, that the darker the person, the less innocent their behaviour. Conscious of it or not, McCay essentially demonises the Other. Flip, Nemo, and the Princess, upon receiving an invitation to join the other imps in the jungle for festivities, are each given a skirt made of straw, just like the ones the jungle imps wear. There is one distinct difference, though: whereas all the jungle imps look exactly

65 alike in dress and physical appearance (figure 21 shows us the jungle imps wearing the same ethnic dress as the chief, whereas every white character has an individualised outfit.), Nemo and his crew are given defining features and a distinctly coloured skirt (figure 23 shows us the blue, red, and yellow straw skirts, that despite being similar in size, shape, and material to the jungle imps’ dress, are still individualised) – they stand out, and are accorded individuality.

Another way in which Impy can be considered as Other is the fact that he is characterised as a child – more so than Nemo, Flip, or the Princess, all of whom at the very least have mastered (adult?) language. Impy, as I have already mentioned, is also much more mischievous than Nemo’s other crew-members, yet another characteristic associated with children. Lahman claims that the relationship between child/adult seems “not only Othered but inescapably dreadful” (282). Why dreadful? Lahman extends Beverley’s master/slave dialectic (which Beverley uses to describe the relationship between researcher and researched), as children are usually not accorded the same rights as adults, “both legally and in institutions such as school” (281 – 82). Although McCay is not a researcher but a creator, and Impy is not researched but created, one can consider the relation between McCay and Impy to be of a similar nature.

Nemo is the hero of Little Nemo, as the title clearly suggests. Though in the following quote Royal uses the word superhero, the quote is still applicable: “The ways in which we conceptualize, represent, and consume our superheroes, for example, can speak volumes of the ways we frame the ethnic subject” (18). We have already discussed class representatives in relation to the characters: Nemo represents the middle class, coming from a (moderately?) affluent family, being white, and speaking in ‘proper’ English. As such, he is quite the opposite of Impy, who shares none of these qualities. The same can be said for Flip. In this sense, Royal’s quote is very appropriate and relevant.5

5 Although this discussion has mostly touched upon Impy, there are other instances of the caricatured Other, such as the Native Americans (figure 24), who are called ‘redskins’ by Nemo, who himself, in a very imperial manner, wishes to ‘blow them to pieces’ with his gun. The natives all have uniform clownish features and speak broken English. The chief says, “Big chief Morpheus he say to me bring Nemo him and he give waumpum plenty to me.” Another example is the royal slaves (figure 25) of the palace of Slumberland, all of whom are Black, thus evoking the history/practice of slavery. Every slave dutifully marches on in the royal palace’s parade.

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Figure 21. Detail. From the online public archive, http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/333 , 5 June 1907.

Figure 22. Detail. From the online public archive, http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/351 , 16 July 1907.

Figure 23. Detail. From the online public archive, http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/348 , 9 July 1907.

67 Figure 24. Detail. From the online public archive, http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/128 , 7 Jan. 1906.

Figure 25. Detail. From the online public archive, http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/display/475 , 7 June. 1908.

According to Roeder, Impy represents ‘savage boyhood’, a term she has used to tie together imagination and primitivism, the admiration for a child’s vitality and creativity. Not only is the imaginative aspect of a child romanticised, but also its primitive aspect, the vitality a child possesses (Roeder 71). Earlier in this thesis we have looked at the relevance of imagination to the heterotopia, namely that the act of using one’s imagination is a requirement of the heterotopia, otherwise it will cease to exist (Keunen’s quote on page 14). Is there any relevance to the second characteristic, the primitive aspect, in the heterotopia? We have looked at the divide between, on the one hand the playful world of the comic strips, and on the other, the more serious grown-up world outside of the funny pages. Roeder explains that the savage or primitive aspect is necessary to survive in an aggressive business world (71), the more serious grown-up world. Unbeknownst to McCay, Impy is actually a very good addition to the imaginative space (which is linked to the heterotopia, even though McCay did not purposefully set out to create a heterotopia), as he, in a certain way, ‘protects’ the reader from the aggressive adult world with his vitality. Impy might indeed represent vitality – as he is mischievous and very vivacious – but he is a problematic character, as he is not allowed to have an individualised identity, or to go through any significant development.

LITTLE NEMO AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

Although Impy is quite an entertaining character, a careless reader might fail to notice the underlying problems surrounding him. More than the careless reader, it is the careless critic

68 who is addressed by Roeder in her work on Little Nemo. She writes that most critics of that time, barring Frederick Burr Opper in 1901, did not comment on the racial and stereotypical aspects in Little Nemo (69). It is the task of contemporary critics to engage in this discussion. Why did critics of that time not comment on these aspects?

While Little Nemo’s chief aim is not political, it is valuable in that it gives readers information on the U.S.A. of that period and the nation’s attitude towards racial matters, among others: for example by drawing these racially offensive caricatures. “Such imagery would continue for decades, in both newspaper comics and comic books,” Shannon writes (197). This activity of depicting stereotypical Others may not necessarily be done with an evil agenda, but could be seen as ignorant: “McCay’s work merely unselfconsciously reflects the racist attitudes of his times […] Whatever McCay’s politics, the imperialist tendencies in Little Nemo’s adventures are not presented as anything but good fun – to answer the question ending the previous paragraph, these tendencies were simply the usual way of portraying other people, and only later was this questioned. Nemo’s sense of entitlement is never questioned any more than is Flip’s abduction of Impy. Both reflect McCay’s expansive American optimism more than any consciously articulated race hatred” (200 - 202). One could surely not get away with this today. Despite the racial issues being no more than ‘good fun’, they are certainly very telling of Americans’ conceptualisation of Self and of ‘americanness’ and the construction of Others. The background of this Self/Other is the American Dream that is embedded in their culture: as Impy clearly represents the Other, Nemo, the hero represents the Self, or the epitome of the American Dream, being part of the middle class and enjoying white privilege. Shannon calls this ‘the American Dream and its nightmare reflection’ (203) – the ‘nightmare side of the coin’, as one could call it, shows that freedom and celebration is not without its negative counterpart. Bukatman speaks of imagination in relation to the American Dream – he uses the term ‘crazy dreamers’ to describe the American citizens who were consumed with the idea of progress, such as the westward expansion or the reinvention of people as a new nation (73) – imagination was important in the creation of a new people, a new identity. One cannot forget and one should not ignore that while the American Dream is in part dependent on freedom and imagination, it is also dependent on the repression of others. The nightmare side of the coin is a dark part of history that cannot be ignored.

The heterotopia is an alternative space within an existing society – it does, however, still contain certain elements of this society, as we have already established. Previously, we have

69 mentioned the economic laws that the heterotopia cannot seem to escape (remember the department stores). It seems that there are certain ideological elements that this heterotopia in Little Nemo cannot escape, either, such as its historical imperial endeavours and tendency towards minimizing the Other through caricature and stereotype. Going back to Foucault’s fifth principle, it seems that the Other is the guest in transit in this heterotopia, free to settle for the night, but never truly accepted into the ‘family quarters’ of the Self. To conclude, this heterotopia is a restrictive or selective heterotopia: another world, but a world that is better for the white man.

70 CONCLUSIVE REMARKS ON THE HETEROTOPIA IN LITTLE NEMO

Over the past century, McCay’s work has garnered a lot of attention. The comic strip has had much influence. Roeder has commented on this lasting influence (185), citing multiple examples of intertextuality or adaptation: Frank King (the use of a flying bed, dream passages, panoramas of the city), Crockett Johnson in the 1940s, and Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of no Tower from 2004, to name a few. Another famous example given by Roeder is Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, which shares a similarity in narrative structure: Calvin often has daydreams, and the last panel returns to reality, much like Nemo’s abrupt wake up in his bed. Roeder does not mention the collaborative work of Marchand and Moebius, an adaptation dating from the mid nineties/early two thousands. This collaborative work is not a compilation of weekly comic strip with a recurring narrative plot, but is a continuous story in which Nemo boards a zeppelin and goes off on adventures, among others visiting the Good King and the Bad King of Slumberland. Though many element overlap, Marchand and Moebius’ work should be considered separately.

Seeing as Little Nemo continues to make its mark on the literary field, even in the 21st century – Katherine Roeder’s research, for example, dates from 2013 –, it is worthwhile to expand its influence into the scholarly field. How could one continue the academic research on Little Nemo? This study has broached the subject of the heterotopia: the medium of the comic has been analysed as a tool to comment on the subject, as well as the heterotopic potential of the dreamspace. One could continue this research, expanding it to comics with similar content, either of the same time period (a synchronic research) or across time (a diachronic research). The list given by Roeder might be an interesting place to start. Another possibility is to undertake a comparative research on adaptations, and explore whether or not other versions, too, engage with the heterotopic potential of the dreamspace. There are a few other adaptations that come to mind, such as the 1911 animation by McCay himself, the animated film version by Massami Hata (1989), the music video by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers of the song “Runnin’ Down a Dream” (1989), the Japanese platform game released in 1990, the comic adaptation by Marchand and Moebius (1994 – 2002), and the comic strip adaptation by Eric Shanower (2015). This analysis on adaptations could require a medium-based approach, as the different versions include (short) film, comic strips, and video games.

71 Where does the analysis of this thesis leave us? Edward Shannon correctly observes that although Little Nemo is not influenced by Freudian dream theory, the comic strip still treats dreams with similar sincerity; it explores the imaginative possibilities (192). The dreamspace – as an existing space – is therefore an excellent choice to delve into the subject of heterotopias: via the inherent creative and imaginative aspect of dreams, the dreamspace allows for the exploration of possible worlds. In other words, it allows for creativity within the confines of society, which creates a certain twofold dimension: on the one hand we have the dreamspace, characterised by its playfulness and typically associated with the imagination inherent in the (Romantic) child, and on the other hand there is the modern era, characterised as utilitarian, commercial, and focused on advancement, typically associated with grownups. This brings us straight back to Keunen’s quote on page 14: “Heterotopias are social spaces in which individuals adopt a similar ‘innovative’ imaginative structure and thereby use space differently to those individuals who use space in a functional or utilitarian manner” (173 own translation). There is an interesting paradox present in this dichotomy. While the dreamspace heterotopia of Little Nemo is grounded in what Bachelard calls the ‘irreality function’, as was previously mentioned in the thesis, the comic strip is published in the space of the newspaper, which belongs to the modern era and functions according to the ‘reality function’. In creating this heterotopia the intention is to enable a different experience of space and time in our world, but this is only possible within the framework of our existing society – so this other space is subject to certain rules of society, including economic laws.

The analysis has explored the dreamspace of Little Nemo as a heterotopia of deviation, an alternative space in society in which individuals deviate from the norm – in the sense that adult readers momentarily abandon the adult world and enter the playful world of children. Slumberland – and more widely, all the spaces Nemo and his crew visit – becomes an enacted utopia for the participants of the dream – and more broadly, the reader of the comic – , it becomes a heterotopia. Regarding the material newspaper, the comic represents a physical ‘space’ where the readers of the newspapers can enjoy a moment of reprieve from the rest of the serious newspaper, where the usual societal rules are in charge. Furthermore, each section (heterotopic space and heterotopic time, immersive and embodied formal and stylistic features, the issue of acceptance in the heterotopia (race)) has questioned if McCay’s approach either enables the development of the heterotopia or restricts it – for example, we have looked at urban panels of the comic strip and asked whether these were sites of control or imagination, the former which restricts the heterotopia, and the latter which encourages it.

72 Another example is the analysis of the reading time or the characters’ speech, and whether or not these elements increased or decreased the heterotopic potential of the comic strip. On the whole, one can conclude that despite the presence of certain elements that might limit the influence of the heterotopia, such as the highly commercialised aspect of the comic, e.g. the Christmas episodes, Little Nemo contains many elements that point to the heterotopic nature of the comic strip. Whether or not McCay has intended it, the creator of this fantastic work or art has successfully actualised a heterotopia.

73 SOURCES

Ahrens, Jörn, and Arno Meteling, eds. Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2010. 1 – 16. Print. Ahrens, Jörn. “The Ordinary Urban: 100 Bullets and the Clichés of Mass Culture.” Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2010. 214 – 228. Print. Arvel, Wirton, ed. Little Nemo in Slumberland. By Winsor McCay. Great Britain: Amazon, Kentauron Publishers, 2016. Print. Balzer, Jens. “ ‘Hully Gee, I’m a Hieroglyphe’ – Mobilizing the Gaze and the Invention of Comics in NYC in 1895.” Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture, and Sequence. Eds. Jörn Ahrens and Arno Meteling. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2010. 19 – 30. Print. Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin Group, 1983. PDF. Bukatman, Scott. "Little Utopias of Disorder." American Art 25.2 (2011): 11-14. Print. ---. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Print. Caracciolo, Marco. "Tell-tale Rhythms: Embodiment and Narrative Discourse." Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 6.2 (2014): 49-73. Print. Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27. Print. Frahm, Ole. "Every Window Tells a Story: Remarks on the Urbanity of Early Comic Strips." Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture, and Sequence. Eds. Jörn Ahrens and Arno Meteling. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2010. 32 – 44. Print. Gardner, Jared. A History of the Narrative Comic Strip. “From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels – A Contribution to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative.” Eds. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin: De Gruyter. 2013. 241 – 253. Print. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comic Books I. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Print. ---. The System of Comic Books II. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. Print.

74 ---. “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Legitimization?” A Comics Studies Reader. Trans. Shirley Smolderen. Eds. Jeet Heer, and Kent Worcester. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 3 – 11. Print. Keunen, Bart. Ik en de stad: fantasmagorie-, ideologie-, en heterotopiekritiek in literatuur en cultuur 1800 – 2010. Gent: Academia Press, 2016. Print. Kukkonen, Karin. "Space, time and causality in graphic narratives: An embodied approach." From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Eds. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin: De Gruyter. 2013. 49-66. Print. Lahman, Maria K. E. "Always Othered: Ethical Research With Children." Journal of Early Childhood Research 6.3 (2008): 281-300. Print. Lambert, Josh. “‘Wait for the Next Pictures’: Intertextuality and Cliffhanger Continuity in Early Cinema and Comic Strips.” Cinema Journal 48.2 (2009): 3–25. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20484446. Print. Lubow, Arthur. “Dream Books.” The Threepenny Review 16 (2006): 13. No longer available on JSTOR. https://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/lubow_su06.html. Mangen, Anne. "Hypertext Fiction Reading: Haptics and Immersion." Journal of research in reading 31.4 (2008): 404-419. Print. Miodrag, Hannah. Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. Print. Ndalianis, Angela. "The Frenzy of the Visible in Comic Book Worlds." Animation 4.3 (2009): 237-248. Print. Rippl, Gabrielle, and Lukas Etter. "Intermediality, Transmediality, and Graphic Narrative." From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Eds. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin: De Gruyter. 2013. 191 – 217. Print. Roeder, Katherine. Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. Print. ---. “Seeing Inside-Out in the Funny Pages.” American Art 25.1 (2011): 24-27. Print. Round, Julia. Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2014. Print. Royal, Derek P. "Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-ethnic Engagements With Graphic Narrative." Melus 32.3 (2007): 7-22. PDF.

75 Shane, D. Grahame. "Heterotopias of illusion." Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society. Eds. Michael Dehaene and Lieven de Cauter. Oxon: Routledge, 2008. 259 – 271. Print. Shannon, Edward A. "Something Black in the American Psyche: Formal Innovation and Freudian Imagery in the Comics of Winsor McCay and Robert Crumb." Canadian review of American studies 40.2 (2010): 187-211. Print. Smolderen, Thierry. The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. Print. Suhr, André. "Seeing the City through a Frame: Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s Acquefacques- Comics." Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture, and Sequence. Eds. Jörn Ahrens and Arno Meteling. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2010. 231-46. Print.

FIGURES

All figures (\ 0, 4, 5, and 6). Chavez, Zachary. “Comic Strip Library - Digital Collection of Classic Comic Strips.” Comic Strip Library - Digital Collection of Classic Comic Strips, no publisher, no date, www.comicstriplibrary.org/. Figure 0. No author. “Golden Age Illustrators.” Pinterest, no publisher, no date, www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/431641945507309105/. Figure 4. No author. “Winsor McCay New York Hippodrome.” Etsy, no publisher, no date, https://www.etsy.com/nl/listing/206704628/winsor-mccay-new-york-hippodrome- 1908?show_sold_out_detail=1 Figure 5. No author. “The Circus Blog.” The Circus Blog RSS, no publisher, no date, www.thecircusblog.com/?p=28755. Figure 6. No author. “Al G. Field Minstrels Vintage Circus Poster Wall Art.” MUSEUM OUTLETS, no publisher, no date, www.museumoutlets.com/circus-posters/fields- vintage-circus-poster-wall-art.

SITES

No author. “Coney Island History | Sea Lion Park | Captain Paul Boyton.” Heart of Coney Island, no publisher, no date, www.heartofconeyisland.com/sea-lion-park-coney- island.html.

76 No author. “History.” Luna Park in Coney Island, no publisher, no date, www.lunaparknyc.com/about/history.com

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