Yes, it’s expensive. It’s worth every penny. At 16-x-22 inches — the size that Winsor McKay’s astounding full-page comic dreamscape ran in the broadsheet NewYork Herald between 1905 and 1911 — it’s striking enough for its sheer heft. But it’s the fantastical compositional brio of those mammoth pages — the etcher’s precision, the kaleidoscope of supersaturated colors — that truly dazzles. (And to put that hefty price tag in perspective, consider that original printed pages of Nemo fetch up to $30,000.) Lovingly self-published by Peter Maresca, this book came out last year — its first run of 5,000 was snatched up almost immediately, and a subsequent pressing of 4,000 was necessitated — but it’s such an astounding piece of curatorial rescue that we just had to spill more ink singing its praises. In this age of shrinking comics sections populated with bland, unfunny, inches-long strips, it’s hard to believe newspapers would once forfeit an entire page every week to such breathtaking visual panache. In a very real sense, these teeming tableaux are fine art at its finest. But, as Douglas Wolk wrote last year in Salon, McKay “didn’t draw his comic strips to be treated as museum pieces; he drew them to make newspaper readers’ eyes bug out of their heads.” For the first time since the turn of the last century, you can see what he means — see Little Nemo’s oneiric spelunking through the realm of King Morpheus as it’s meant to be seen. Clear some shelf space. Lots of it. And order at sundaypressbooks.com.
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