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"If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you are not afraid of dying, there is nothing you cannot achieve." - Lao Tzu

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hyperallergic: Winsor McCay, a full “Little Nemo in Slumberland” strip, taken from the collection Little Nemo in Slumberland, So Many Splendid Sundays Appearing in newspapers from 1905 - 1914, “Little Nemo in Slumberland“‘s fantastic imagery and playful use of the form of comics serves as an important influence for generations of comics and cartoons. Jeet Heer discusses McCay’s practice and place in the history of the world of comics in the Virginia Quarterly Review: Created in the wake of the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, Little Nemo was as much an architectural fantasy as a fairy tale. McCay delighted in creating pristine fictional palaces, rich in colonnades and endless hallways. Like a child playing in a sandlot, he also took pleasure in tearing down what he had so quickly created. The fertility of McCay’s imagination is both daunting and troubling. His mind moved too quickly to linger over his own creations too long. His need to create a quick succession of fresh images gives his work the rushed unreality of dreams, and sometimes the insubstantiality of dreams as well. McCay’s most important innovation as an artist was his close attention to movement. Half a generation before McCay, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge had already revolutionized our sense of how bodies move through space with his time-lapse studies of horses. McCay never directly copied from photographs, relying instead on his remarkable eidetic memory, but he internalized the lessons of Muybridge. All of McCay’s characters, from flying mosquitoes to scampering little boys to trotting horses, move with the fluency of life. Because comics are a succession of images, frozen when seen in isolation but moving as we read the page, McCay’s attention to motion brought to the foreground the distinctive aesthetic of the art form. McCay’s reliance on memory as his chief storehouse of images is further evidence of his deep insight into the nature of comics. Chris Ware, a sharp theorist of art as well as a greatly talented cartoonist, has repeatedly argued that comics are memory-drawings rather than life-drawings. “A cartoon is not an image taken from life,” Ware notes. “A cartoon is taken from memory. You’re trying to distill the memory of an experience, not the experience itself.” Unlike a painter or an illustrator working in front of a model, a cartoonist is drawing images in sequence that must possess narrative flow. Memories, which are fleeting images in a hazy sequence, are the closest cognitive parallel for how comics work. (Dreams, of course, are nighttime memories, sharing the sequential fuzziness of retrospective thought.) Click through for a larger image.

hyperallergic:

Winsor McCay, a full “Little Nemo in Slumberland” strip, taken from the collection Little Nemo in Slumberland, So Many Splendid Sundays

Appearing in newspapers from 1905 - 1914, “Little Nemo in Slumberland“‘s fantastic imagery and playful use of the form of comics serves as an important influence for generations of comics and cartoons. Jeet Heer discusses McCay’s practice and place in the history of the world of comics in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

Created in the wake of the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, Little Nemo was as much an architectural fantasy as a fairy tale. McCay delighted in creating pristine fictional palaces, rich in colonnades and endless hallways. Like a child playing in a sandlot, he also took pleasure in tearing down what he had so quickly created. The fertility of McCay’s imagination is both daunting and troubling. His mind moved too quickly to linger over his own creations too long. His need to create a quick succession of fresh images gives his work the rushed unreality of dreams, and sometimes the insubstantiality of dreams as well.

McCay’s most important innovation as an artist was his close attention to movement. Half a generation before McCay, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge had already revolutionized our sense of how bodies move through space with his time-lapse studies of horses. McCay never directly copied from photographs, relying instead on his remarkable eidetic memory, but he internalized the lessons of Muybridge. All of McCay’s characters, from flying mosquitoes to scampering little boys to trotting horses, move with the fluency of life. Because comics are a succession of images, frozen when seen in isolation but moving as we read the page, McCay’s attention to motion brought to the foreground the distinctive aesthetic of the art form.

McCay’s reliance on memory as his chief storehouse of images is further evidence of his deep insight into the nature of comics. Chris Ware, a sharp theorist of art as well as a greatly talented cartoonist, has repeatedly argued that comics are memory-drawings rather than life-drawings. “A cartoon is not an image taken from life,” Ware notes. “A cartoon is taken from memory. You’re trying to distill the memory of an experience, not the experience itself.” Unlike a painter or an illustrator working in front of a model, a cartoonist is drawing images in sequence that must possess narrative flow. Memories, which are fleeting images in a hazy sequence, are the closest cognitive parallel for how comics work. (Dreams, of course, are nighttime memories, sharing the sequential fuzziness of retrospective thought.)

Click through for a larger image.