Laitan tähän kokonaisen New York Timesin kiehtovan artikkelin joka käsittelee Little Nemon uusintapainosta joka tehtiin alkuperäiselle formaatille mahdollisimman uskollisesti. Moderaattorit voivat siirtää jos haluavat:
Restoring Slumberland
By SARAH BOXER
The book is so huge you have to crawl over it to read it. It's 21 inches long and 16 inches wide. And cartoonists from Matt Groening to Chris Ware are going nuts over it.
Winsor McCay published his first Little Nemo cartoon a century ago, on Oct. 15, 1905, in The New York Herald. The first panel shows a little boy in a nightshirt sitting up in bed staring at a clownish figure before him. The narration says: "Little Nemo had just fallen asleep when an Oomp appeared, who said, 'You are requested to appear before his majesty, Morpheus of Slumberland.' " The Oomp then presents Nemo with Somnus, a gentle horse to ride into Slumberland.
So began a fantastical comic about a sleeping boy. It was an instant critical success, but the public, especially children, were lukewarm. Since then, "Little Nemo in Slumberland" has found its public. In 1966, Little Nemo was featured in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many books of Nemo reproductions followed.
But Peter Maresca, a comics collector, wasn't happy, he said in a recent telephone interview. Even the best preserved pages of "Little Nemo in Slumberland" were fast deteriorating. Soon no one would be able to see them the way they originally looked. Mr. Maresca wanted, he said, to publish a selection of Little Nemo comics just the way they appeared in the Sunday funnies: in the same colors, on rough matte paper that looked like newsprint, and at the same size.
He approached numerous presses, but none would take it on, he explained. Finally he went to Art Spiegelman, the founder of Raw and the author of the very large comic book "In the Shadow of No Towers," who suggested that Mr. Maresca publish it himself. So he did. It cost him, he said, something close to "the price of a three-bedroom house in Kansas."
On the way to self-publishing "Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!" (Sunday Press, $120), Mr. Maresca learned how much size really does matter to Little Nemo.
In the comic of Feb. 2, 1908, Little Nemo travels through Befuddle Hall, a place where everything is elongated. The panels are stretched and squeezed. The effect at full scale is disorienting, like a funhouse mirror. "You really have the stuff spinning around you when it's that big," Mr. Maresca said.
In the comic of Oct. 29, 1905, Little Nemo walks on stilts among flamingos. The panels become longer and longer as Little Nemo's situation becomes more perilous. Finally, as he falls in slow motion, the panels become progressively shorter. You can see this in smaller reproductions, Mr. Maresca explained, but the effect at full scale is different, enveloping you much the way a movie screen does.
"The idea of cinema was in McCay's mind," Mr. Maresca said. In the comic of May 22, 1910, Little Nemo walks in Martian air and it looks as if a movie camera were following him through space. As he moves forward, the background fades. (So do the speech balloons, as if the sound were growing dim.)
It's not only the grand cinematic things that come through at full scale. It's the little things too, like the words.
Not only can you actually read them, but you can also see how they were made. Consider the strip of July 17, 1910, in which two teams of hypnotists try to put a yellow blob, the Whang-Doodle, to sleep. If you look carefully, you will see that some of the letters in those speech bubbles are blue rather than black.
"At first I thought it was a mistake," Mr. Maresca said. When he took a closer look, though, he noticed that when the characters were close up, they spoke in loud black words. When they were far away they spoke in blue.
"A lot of people know more about Winsor McCay, the man, than I," Mr. Maresca said. "But few know Nemo better than I, panel for panel. I think McCay drew some of these pages in less time than it took me to restore them."
Even after assembling the best set of original funny pages that he could find, Mr. Maresca had to spend between 5 and 20 hours restoring each one. Some pages were so damaged that panels had to be redrawn.
Color accuracy was crucial. Usually, Mr. Maresca said, a printer will try to get maximum contrast by making the background sheets pure white. But since the background sheets of old newspapers are actually different yellows, thanks to variable fading, the colors in the artwork become distorted in the correction process.
Mr. Maresca ignored the imperfections in the newsprint and corrected only the color within the drawings. Then he put each on a new newsprint background. It was, he said, "a little crazy." He was after "an imperfect ideal." He said he wanted the finished product to look just as inconsistent as the original newspaper pages did.
Finally, he flew to Malaysia in order to watch the pages coming off the presses. It took 60 hours to print 5,000 books. And he stayed up through almost all of it. "There was one press check I slept through," he said, and when he awoke, "I freaked out." The page still rankles him. He wouldn't say which one it was. "You have to figure it out yourself."
On the Web site for the new book, sundaypressbooks.com, Mr. Spiegelman tried to explain just how different the big Little Nemo is from all the little Little Nemos. "I mean, it's as if somebody showed you a tabletop model of the Chrysler Building and said, 'It's just like that, only bigger.' "
Chris Ware, the author of "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth" and the designer of some books of comic reprints, said in an e-mail message that he was rethinking the whole enterprise: "After this book, it just seems unacceptable and a disservice to the artist's memory to do it any other way."
You can't get much more perfectly imperfect than that.
