Comic Strips : Winsor McCay & Bill Watterson

This week's reading is a series of comic strips from Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay and Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson.

While I grew up on Calvin and Hobbes, I had only heard mention of McCay's work. So, I decided to read both comics to see how they would compare as two strips featuring the adventures of a young boy.

Breaking into McCay's work was very surprising. I was expecting traditional pen-and-ink strips, but instead found a comic in which each panel is its own painstakingly designed, full-color illustration.

McCays's style is strongly informed by classical illustrators. His work joins the curving designs of art nouveau with Maxfield Parrish's lush classical backdrops. While these illustrators' work was quite realistic, however, the world of Slumberland is abound with highly designed creatures.

While cartoonists tend to caricature, McCay truly takes his designs one more step forward. One character from McCay's strip featured above looks like she could have stepped out of the Hayao Miyazaki film Spirited Away:

The look of McCay's work is, of course, vastly different from the ink-brushed, loops-and-lines look of Calvin and Hobbes. Aside from the art, however, I found the content to be very different as well.

In Little Nemo in Slumberland, Nemo goes on surreal and very escapist journeys into new lands. He only experiences reality at the very end of the strip, when he wakes. By contrast, Calvin and Hobbes is entirely set in a satirized version of the trials and tribulations of a boy's everyday life.

How the characters navigate their respective worlds is opposite as well. While Calvin gets himself into trouble constantly and must find a way to wiggle out of it, this is not so in Slumberland. Instead, Little Nemo seems to be propelled from one event to another through almost no will of his own.

Although these comic strips are very different from each other, they are each fantastic works. After experiencing them both, I definitely have a broader view on what the comic strip can achieve.

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