TALKING LITTLE NEMO AND THE YELLOW KID WITH CHECKER

[MattBrady]

by Michael Lorah

The names of comic book creators Winsor McCay and Richard Felton (R.F.) Outcault need no introduction. McCay is most famous as the creator of the dawn-of-the-20th-century comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. He also created the strip Dream of a Rarebit Fiend and Gertie the Dinosaur, one of the first animations ever produced (which caused near riots among the audience, who could not understand the idea of a monstrous drawing moving!).

Outcault’s The Yellow Kid is often regarded as the first comic strip in American history, and as such is the progenitor of… well…, everything that brings you here to Newsarama.

Little Nemo in Slumberland ran in The New York Herald from October 15, 1905 to April 23, 1911, when it flipped to New York American from April 30, 1911 until 1913. The strip briefly returned in 1924 before McCay drew his last Nemo story in 1927. Known for McCay’s gorgeous, complex and dreamlike illustrations, the strip followed Little Nemo on stream-of-conscious misadventures that ended with him being awoken by jarring, dramatic circumstances.

The Yellow Kid dates back to 1894, when it debuted in Truth magazine. Its popularity skyrocketed in 1895, with Outcault’s move to New York World. After an ownership dispute and Outcault’s switching papers (to New York Journal American), the strip eventually ended in 1898. The Yellow Kid helped spawn the phrase “yellow journalism” with its scathing commentary on the culture of New York and the United States of the time.

Today, eighty years since the most recent of those strips appeared, Checker Book Publishing plans to bring both landmark series back to the public eye with comprehensive, hardcover collections of both series.

We sat down with Mark Thompson, the owner of Checker, to discuss the importance of these strips and their place in the modern comic book landscape.

NRAMA: Checker is really making a concerted effort to bring back some of the most classic comics of all. You’ve tackled Flash Gordon and Steve Canyon, and now you’re really going to the medium’s roots with (the recently released first volume of) Little Nemo in Slumberland and, soon, The Yellow Kid. What prompted you to collect these two seminal series?

Mark Thompson: The answer to that is found in your question itself. You described them as two seminal series, and it’s exactly for that reason. They are seminal series, and it’s long been our goal as a company to bring material like this back in print. Number one, it makes us [Checker] look good, and number two, the industry, to be taken seriously as an artform, needs to have its core quality starting point material in print. For example, if you go into a bookstore, you can find William Shakespeare, if you go into a video shop you can find Casablanca, if you turn on the television set, you can find I Love Lucy on some station 24-hours a day. I feel stuff like The Yellow Kid and Little Nemo is that sort of critical material. Yellow Kid was actually one of the first books that we were considering doing when I started the company. We just got extraordinarily lucky and had material like Flash Gordon and Steve Canyon come available. Since we’re a small publisher, we couldn’t do everything at once, but now, we have the time and resources to devote to a book that we’d basically always wanted to get out there.

NRAMA: Both series are public domain, right?

MT: Yeah.

NRAMA: It seems that there are versions of Nemo in print from approximately six different publishers right now. Why jump into that particularly crowded pool, and what makes Checker’s Little Nemo collections stand out?

MT: each of those individual publications, and how can I be politically correct here?, they each have their own warts and flaws, and they’re each in a various stage of incompleteness. As a comic person, I’m sure you can recognize that a lot of comic book people are very anal retentive as far as being a completist,

NRAMA: (laughs). Yeah.

MT: And I’m one of them. It was kind of shocking to me, as we were evaluating doing this stuff, that although these other publications have a lot of merit to them, nobody had ever done a complete collection of the material. Which, again, going back to the first question, as an artform, we really have to know where we’ve been in order to go forward. Not to sound cliché. It was simply something that has to be done, whether it’s us or any of the other publishers. It’s something that eventually had to be done, and it just happened to be us.

NRAMA: What years are included in your first Little Nemo collection?

MT: The first volume of the Checker Little Nemo edition covers the years 1905-1909, and also includes the extraordinarily rare Tales of the Jungle Imps. That strip McCay did in 1903 in the Cincinnati Enquirer, and it was before he became rich and famous when he went to New York. It has several of the precursor characters that started in Little Nemo. That’s why we included it.

NRAMA: Nemo ran from 1905-1913, changing papers (and names!) once during that time. McCay brought the strip back in 1924 through 1927. Do you expect to collect the entire run, including the 20s return?

MT: Yes. The 1920s series is going to be collected comprehensively, again the most comprehensive collection. We have approximately 60-75% of it in full color, and the remainder are in black and white.

NRAMA: Going on to Outcault, The Yellow Kid is, from what I’ve read of it, very primitive. The visual language wasn’t nearly codified at that point, and the storytelling is fairly chunky. I don’t mean to disparage it, because it’s obviously a major piece of the medium’s development, but I have to wonder if the market for The Yellow Kid is strong enough to support a gorgeously produced, high-end, $50 volume?

MT: This type of material spreads across multiple markets. There’s the comic book purists and so on and so forth, art aficionados - Outcault’s artwork is more simplistic, but I would compare it to a Norman Rockwell. He captures a moment in time, and it’s extraordinarily interesting. Outcault’s originals sell through the roof, so I think the demand will be there. You’d mentioned that the stuff is fairly primitive, and this might be leading into a future question, but the cartoons are pretty complex editorials of issues of the day. On its face value, the cartoons are very complex depictions of individual scandals of the time and we’ve done pretty arduous research. Some of them are on New York politics, some are government scandals and people embezzling stuff, and so on and so forth. So once you see the editorial to go along with the cartoons…

NRAMA: This is the next question! Will there be any historical content included to cast the book in the context of its time and circumstances, or the innovations it created? For example, The Yellow Kid is, from what I’ve read, played a big part in solidifying the use and form of word balloons.

MT: To expand on what I was describing earlier, it’s very, very integral to the society of the day. He’s poking fun on different morals and different scandals, and the different imagery that he includes in there, where such and such an image is supposed to be this politician and this image is supposed to be making fun of suffragists, and prohibition movements of the day - so yeah, our research into it has been pretty comprehensive. As you’ll see in the edition, I think it sheds a lot of light into the original meaning of the cartoons. The nuts and bolts of his art style, we may delve into that, but I don’t think we’ll get as descriptive as he was using such and such a pen in this style.

NRAMA: It’ll be more focused on the editorial content.

MT: Yeah, because that, in my mind, really opens up the door to understanding the power of the artform, because Outcault really was influential in his day. Editorially cartoonists are still influential to this day, because of his talents.

NRAMA: The Yellow Kid debuted in 1894 in black & white, but eventually became color in summer of 1895. Will your collection be reproducing the strips in their original hues?

MT: Yeah, we will be presenting the material in its original form. If it originally appeared in black and white, we’re not going to colorize it obviously. Sometimes, when publishers do that, I think it’s kind of pretentious. The original colorization from the color material, we try to faithfully clean that up and reproduce that to be exactly, as close as possible, to the original look of the piece.

NRAMA: Yeah.. That’s what I was trying to ask. Outcault’s strip was originally called Hogan’s Alley, but when he switched papers, the original paper (Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World) retained the rights to the Hogan’s Alley name. Outcault still used the characters, however, and re-titled the strip The Yellow Kid for William Randolph Heart’s The New York Journal. You’ll be sticking with the Outcault material, regardless of the originating paper?

MT: Yes. We’re trying to comprehensively collect, again back to my completist vein… And Hogan’s Alley was more of a nickname for the original strip.

NRAMA: Okay.

MT: It was more of a location or a setting than the actual listed title of the ongoing strip. When Outcault changed papers, yeah, the kid went with him.

NRAMA: Will you print any of the post-Outcault Hogan’s Alley, simply for comparison’s sake?

MT: We might include one or two artistic pieces, but we really don’t try to get into the non-essential material. I compare that to Happy Days when Richie Cunningham left. When Outcault left, it was like jumping the shark.

NRAMA: You were saying that Outcault’s original art sells for outrageous sums. You didn’t have any trouble reproducing any of the artwork?

MT: We get the artwork from varied sources. We’re set up for this kind of stuff. We have state of the art material and state of the art machines. For example, our scanner was very expensive. I often joke that if there’s a fire or I have a heart attack, save the scanner first. Carry the scanner over my dead, wrangling body. (laughs) We’re set up with the expertise to bring in the material in in various original formats, from the original artwork and the original formats. I’m not trying to say that all of it is from the original artwork, but from original newspapers, from original books, microfilm. When we’re done with it, if we’ve done our job, and I think we’ve done our job fairly well up until now, people really can’t tell if we used original artwork or not.

NRAMA: Any final words for the readers?

MT: Just to the readers, we continue to be ever grateful, as always, to every comic retailer and fan for allowing us the financial support to bring this critical material back to the fold.

Visit Checker at their website www.checkerbpg.com, where you can also see more sample pages from ]Little Nemo in Slumberland[/b] and The Yellow Kid.

[DuncanHines]

At first, I was turned off to Checker because of the crap image quality of their Supreme TPBs, but their other reprints of Winsor McCay's early work, and their Early Works of Dr Seuss HCs are beautiful!
I bought a big, nice reprint collection of the Little Nemo strips that was published by Evergreen (but it looks like a Taschen book... weird). I thought it was a complete collection of all of them, but I guess I was wrong. I'm now considering these new ones, but money is the grubby little middleman between me and classic comic reprints...

[newfoundma]

I remember a Little Nemo cartoon movie and video game from when I was younger and thinking it was a shame that those characters weren't used elsewhere. Oh, youth. I am behind on reading my trades, but maybe I'll ask for this for a present. It looks spectacular!

[weaselwelch]

I will be picking up the Yellow Kid for sure.

I have an over sized hard cover of Little Nemo that collects the strips from 1905-1914. The publisher is Evergreen.

But I might have to look into this volume.

[Evil Twin]

Not everyone can be Windsor McCay, but his instinctive understanding of what can be done with a page is still outstanding. It would be nice to see more of that and less storyboards as comic art.

That Little Nemo book is going on my want list.

[Randy Hassan]

No reviews on Amazon...anybody seen one of these?

[Comic-Reader]

Originally Posted by DuncanHines

At first, I was turned off to Checker because of the crap image quality of their Supreme TPBs, but their other reprints of Winsor McCay's early work, and their Early Works of Dr Seuss HCs are beautiful!
I bought a big, nice reprint collection of the Little Nemo strips that was published by Evergreen (but it looks like a Taschen book... weird). I thought it was a complete collection of all of them, but I guess I was wrong. I'm now considering these new ones, but money is the grubby little middleman between me and classic comic reprints...

This is the book we have, I think. I'd like to know what's missing from this book as well before I plunk down money for another collection. Also, how does the Checker book look inside in terms of size of strips? The originals were apparantly 16"x21" and Amazon has the Checker book at a size of approx 9.2"x12.6" so how readable are they?

The Evergreen/Taschen book is slightly larger at 9.7"x12.7" and it has 432 pages for 30 dollars and covers the entire 1905-1914 period. The Checker is 288 pages for 50 dollars and covers only 1905-1909 (both prices before discounts).

I'd really need to know how much is missing from the Evergreen/Taschen to see if the Checker is worthwhile. Right now, I don't think so. I saw the first book in the store, but didn't even bother to look through it.

I do buy most of the other Checker stuff, however. I find the quality acceptable for the most part, but I do think that the format for the Steve Canyon reprints is wrong. It should have been landscape to allow the strips to be reprinted at a larger size. The dailies are often quite small.

I don't have that Yellow Kid hardcover that's been around for over a decade, so I'll definitely check that one out, but right now I'm holding off on the Checker Little Nemo.

[johnchrist]

My dad had a "Little Nemo" collection, used to read it when I was a kid, absolutely loved it! It was so far out there and crazy that it made Bill Watterson's rendering of Calvin's dream lands seem tame by comparisson.
Haven't looked at it for years but I can remember it quite well even today. Didn't realize just how old those strips were though until I read th earticle, figured they were just from my parents' childhood... not from my grandparents'!

[NewRisingSun]

I have the Evergreen edition too, and I love it.

If the checker editions do print a considerable amount of things that evergreen missed, then I might just have to pick up a copy.

[Amoebas]

I have so many different Nemo collections now that I can't justify a new one - BUT - any fan of comics (strips or books) are doing themselves an injustice by not reading/studying McCay's work.

Genius. Pure Genius.

I have a few Yellow Kid collection, but nothing bordering on complete. I might look at it, but truly, as historically important as it is, it's a tough strip to get into.

[Cliffy]

IIRC, the Evergreen and Taschen Nemo are complete thru 1913, but don't contain the revival material from the '20's. (Nor, I think, do they have the Jungle Imps precursor series mentioned in the article.) The big question here is going to be print quality -- I've browsed the Taschen and it's lovely, but I've heard that there's some fuzzy linework in other reprints -- espeicially since the original Nemos were printed substantially larger.

--Cliffy

[DJ Sloofus]

As mentioned in the article, the Checker book has all (I assume all) of the Jungle Imp strips, which are not in the other collection. I have both, and I have to admit the Checker collection is a little better, if more expensive (and only the first volume).

Checker is putting out some good stuff, but I wish they would treat the Steve Canyon strips with a little more respect. They're cramming way too much copy on each page; these should be printed up like the Terry and the Pirates hardcovers by Flying Buttress from the 1980s. Those were beautiful editions! You can barely even read the Canyon reprints from Checker.

[Not From Around]

Sounds like a very ambitious project! I didn't know that Checker was interested in reaching that far back. I hope the technical quality turns out well. The few Checker reprints I've seen look pretty good.

[beta-ray]

I remember these from reading about comics as a kid (read some Nemo, but never read the kid). Sadly today most kids would probably think of a fish and Bart Simpson when reading the article title.

Amazing quality of illustration...

EDIT: Not to knock Pixar's Nemo or the Simpsons, I like them both!

[dizzychad]

$50 for volumes reprinted at less than a third of the size needed to fully appreciate Nemo as originally intended?

Yeah, no thanks. The Sunday Press reprinting, while a bit spendy, is the only way to appreciate Nemo - or to even read the text. It can't be done with a magnifying glass.

And why on Earth is the Yellow Kid a softcover for the same price? If they're doing this simple aspect on the cheap, it makes one wonder about the rest of the project.

[Checkerbpg]

If you need more information or have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

Susan Koller
Publicity Director
Checker Book Publishing Group
2044A. South Alex Road
West Carrollton, Ohio 45449
P: (937)-388-0088
F: (937)-388-0089
info@checkerbpg.com
.

[Checkerbpg]

Due to the many inquiries about the release date of Little Nemo Volume 2 on the customize, retailers and media representatives, the publisher of Checker Book Publishing Group has written the letter below to inform all interested parties on the progress of this groundbreaking project. If you need more information or have any questions, please feel free to contact me.



Sincerely,

Susan Koller
Publicity Director
Checker Book Publishing Group
2044A. South Alex Road
West Carrollton, Ohio 45449
P: (937)-388-0088
F: (937)-388-0089
info@checkerbpg.com
.



An open letter to Comics aficionados:

This is a letter to fans and retailers who have been waiting for our second edition of Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay.

We had been scheduled to print this edition several moths ago and I realize it is running late. I thought out of respect I should discuss the reasons why.

Checker is a specialist in classic illustrated material. As such, we had, of course, ambitiously targeted the watershed publication of the last century and THE all time seminal comics creation- Little Nemo. Our initial plans included a significant amount of original newspapers we have been acquiring over the past two years.

However, in our marketing and press release we warned fans that due to the rarity of this material, this edition was originally planned to contain black and white versions of some of the late Winsor McCay Little Nemo run from 1924-1926. This extraordinary piece of American History has NEVER been collected! This is an astounding embarrassment to the publishing community as a whole because McCay was such a visual pioneer.

Well, as luck would have it, just prior to print dates earlier in the fall we discovered the final pieces we needed to accomplish the collection of the entire 1924-1926 periods in color. This has extended the production by a few months, but we hope you understand. We will refund any orders to any customer who needs to change because of this, but as a historian of this type of material we had to aggressively pursue this late find to include in our omnibus Little Nemo collections…which when published; will be unlike any other Nemo book ever published in fact- be a rare gem amongst ALL books ever published.



Sincerely,


Mark Thompson
Publisher
Checker Book Publishing Group