Little Nemo in Slumberland - Arsetz - P. A. Nolte

1/ Nemo in bed.

Caption: One night, after many failed attempts, Morpheus sent one of his most trusted advisors to deliver Nemo to Princess Camille.

Caption: But Arsetz was not the same as the others.  He did not reveal himself through conventional means.

2/ Nemo wakes as he sinks through the bed, the sheets and covers getting pulled down into the dark along with him.

3/ Nemo has dropped through the bed and into, ... the night sky?  His sheets tumble downward, but Nemo instinctually spreads out his arms in an attempt to fly.  At the same time, a small bird arrives to speak with him.  Dark clouds are gathering.

Arsetz: Little Nemo!  The King's daughter, Princess Camille, has requested your presence.

Nemo: The princess?!

4/ The dark clouds are overwhelming now.  One of them emits a bolt of lightning that strikes Nemo.

Nemo: Oh no!

SFX: ZZAAKT

5/ Singed, he drops like a rock into the waters of the murky lake below.

6/ Underwater, a fish tries to speak with him.  Like with the bird, Nemo is too engrossed in his adventure to pay much attention.

Arsetz: Little Nemo!  Wait!  You mustn't get lost in the Forest of Nascent Dreams!  It's too wild!

7/ Nemo crawls out of the lake.

8/ As he does, ominous laughter sounds over his shoulder.

SFX: Ha Ha Ha!

9/ Nemo runs through the forest at the edge of the lake.  A squirrel, Arsetz in disguise, tries to match his pace and call out to Nemo.

Arsetz: Little Nemo!  Please!  If you don't stop running you'll--

10/ Nemo is hanging off the foot of his bed, as if he tripped and fell, but found sheets and pillows instead of foliage and underbrush.  His mother is chastising him.

Mother: Wake up, Nemo!  You don't want to be late for your test!

Caption: Maybe tomorrow night, Little Nemo...

LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND – Derek Adnams

Page 1 – (9 Panels)

Layout is a traditional 9-Panel grid, which the reader will read like a backwards “S”, as follows: Top Row – Panel 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3; Middle Row – Panel 1.6, 1.5 and 1.4; Bottom Row – Panel 1.7, 1.8 and 1.9.  Each panel will also have its corresponding reading order (1, 2, 3 etc.) written in one of the corners, old-school style.

1.1:  Interior, Nemo’s bedroom, night.  Nemo is asleep, dreaming away.  A night sky filled with stars is visible out his window.

Silent Panel

1.2:  Same as Panel 1.1, only now Nemo’s “dream-self” is floating out of his corporeal frame and gliding across the gutter into Panel 1.3.

Silent Panel

1.3:  Exterior, night, the Castle of the Dream King, Morpheus from the classic Neil Gaiman series The Sandman.  The remainder of the story takes place in the Dreaming.  This panel contains the top half of the castle, the bottom half in Panel 1.4.  The top half of Nemo is in this panel, floating over from Panel 1.2.  He’s also falling through the gutter that separates Panel 1.3 and Panel 1.4, drawing the reader’s eye down.

Silent Panel

1.4:  The bottom half the Castle of the Dream King from Panel 1.3, Nemo’s bottom half about to land, coming over from Panel 1.3.

Morpheus (caption):  I have called you many times, Little One. 

1.5:  Morpheus, Dream of the Endless, standing at the beginning of a path, a swirling geometry of bricks like the start of the “Yellow Brick Road” in The Wizard of Oz.  He is regal, wearing a dark tattered cloak, his hands resting at his sides.  Nemo is approaching him from the right, the path trailing off to the left.

Morpheus:  And I know you heard my summons.  Your gifts are too powerful for you to not have been alerted.

Nemo:  But why do you need me, Sir?

1.6:  The continuation of the path from Panel 1.6, Nemo and Morpheus walking across the gutter to the remainder and end of the path Panel 1.7.

Morpheus:  You live in a world of miracles, and thus dreams have become too commonplace.  Every moment of your life has become a waking dream. 

Morpheus:  When you walk into my world, into my kingdom, you are no longer impressed.

Nemo:  What does that mean?  “Impressed”?

1.7:  The end of the path from Panel 1.6.  Unlike the start in Panel 1.5, the path ends abruptly, the bricks overgrown and taken over by the grass.  The bottom halves of Nemo and Morpheus are walking the path, approaching the end, coming over from Panel 1.6.

Morpheus:  You no longer believe in magic, Nemo.  Would you like to remember?

Nemo:  I sure would!

1.8:  What waits at the end of the path - the Corinthian!  The Corinthian stands, dapper in a beige linen suit, hair slicked back.  He is holding his sunglasses in his hand, revealing his tooth lined eye sockets.  All three mouths are smiling.  Morpheus stands in the foreground, beckoning Nemo to go toward the Corinthian.

Morpheus:  Then you must become a nightmare.

1.9:  Nemo, tiny, floating into the open mouth-eye of the Corinthian.  He will be consumed and become the new Corinthian, a being made out of nightmare-stuff.

Morpheus (caption):  I believe you know the Corinthian.

 

 

Little Nemo in Transmetropolitan - R.A. Wonsowski

Panel 1- LITTLE NEMO is shocked and cornered in bed by SPIDER JERUSALEM, grinning like a Cheshire cat with a cigarette between his teeth.

NEMO: Wh-wh-who are YOU?
SPIDER: Why, I'm your Uncle Spidey. I have all sorts of sights to see.

Panel 2- long shot of a Gothic hospital, a rainbow aura surrounding it against a grey sky. An ambulance is in front of a door, two orderlies escorting a straightjacketed figure inside. NEMO and SPIDER walk up the drive hand in hand to it in conversation.

NEMO: What is this place?
SPIDER: Welcome to the Hillary Clinton Hospital for the Politically Insane. Let's take the nickel tour...

Panel 3- In a rec room filled with drooling catatonics, a buxom blond showing a lot of leg and stretching a Fox News t-shirt to the breaking point is strapped to a wheelchair, getting an injection from an elephant in a nurse's uniform. A man in a suit clutching a CNN mike is strapped to a gurney getting tied off for his injection from a donkey also dressed as a nurse. Both reporters have expressions of orgiastic euphoria plastered on their faces. NEMO and SPIDER can be seen walking by in an open doorway.

NEMO: Are they getting medicine?
SPIDER: No, silly boy! They're getting the disease, which they will spread through the magic of televised punditry.

Panel 4- a Rube Goldberg designed bathroom. A corporate businessman sits on a toilet, pants around his ankles and reading the New York Times, with an oversized tank behind him with MONSANTO stencilled on it. The coiling pipe from the bowl leads to an outhouse that looks like the Capitol building. NEMO and SPIDER peek over from another stall to spy. A mouse in the corner holds a small placard.

(from inside outhouse): YAY!!
NEMO: B...but why?
SPIDER: So that they, in turn, can shit all over us! It's how you get all those fancy schoolbooks, and yet learn absolutely nothing!
MOUSE PLACARD: Know your school board!

Panel 5- what looks like a cheap hotel room. Lady Liberty and some fat guy are getting it on under the bedsheets. Liberty looks bored and lights a cigarette as the fat guy finishes. SPIDER covers NEMO's eyes as they walk by.

SPIDER: Nothing to see here except a lazy metaphor!
NEMO: You said there'd be pie!

Panel 6- NEMO has fallen out of bed. He sits on the floor, visibly shaken, hair mussed, trying to light a cigarette.

(from outside the bedroom): What's going on in there?!
NEMO: IT'S YOUR FAULT!

Inset panel lower right corner of page. WINDSOR MCCAY glares at WARREN ELLIS, who takes a pull from a hip flask.

MCCAY: You're a sick man.
ELLIS: You started it.

Little Nemo in Slumberland – Not All Dreams Are As Sweet – MK Stangeland Jr.

(6 Panels)

Panel 1: NEMO, in classic style, is walking through the deserted street of his home city. The direction he’s walking towards shows hints of something else on the horizon.

TEXT: I walked through a dream of a land far away,

Panel 2: NEMO approaches what appears to have once been SLUMBERLAND. It looks rather abandoned, the full extent of the damage is not quite clear yet.

CAMILLE: (Off-Panel, minimized) nemo…

TEXT: A place I knew well in my youth,

Panel 3: The full extent of the devastation wrought upon SLUMBERLAND is clear – the place looks like someone effectively destroyed it, though it continues to persist for unknown reasons. Longstanding characters – minus PRINCESS CAMILLE – are lying about the ground, fallen but without signs that they’re actually dead.

CAMILLE: (Off-Panel) Nemo…

TEXT: And as I saw that it had seen better days,

Panel 4: NEMO looks to where he sees PRINCESS CAMILLE off in the distance, much as he would remember her from times past. Despite the distance, she’s looking towards him, a single arm reached out in his direction. Something dark looms behind her, however.

CAMILLE: Return to us, Nemo…

TEXT: In my time did I realize the truth –

Panel 5: A continuation of PANEL 4 – PRINCESS CAMILLE is now a full-grown woman, and her look is as one who finds herself in a terrible situation, though as we see her she looks mostly fine aside from the dark shadow monsters that loom behind her in an intimidating and terrible fashion. The monsters have their attention focused largely on NEMO.

CEMILLE: Save us…

TEXT: That to that world I must somehow return,

Panel 6: NEMO wakes – we see him lying in bed, now a full-grown man in his mid to late twenties. He looks like he’s just awoken from a nightmare.

TEXT: Lest some terrible thing be set loose.

(END PAGE)

Little Nemo in Slumberland - Thirty-Something Nemo in Slumberland - Colin Cheney

* Panel 1 stretches across top of the page with the title incorporated into the artwork. Panels 2-10 are arranged in a standard 9-panel grid. 

* As in an early McCay strip, captions should include panel number, and run through the white-space UNDERNEATH the associated panel. Captions carry over from one panel to another, as in McCay. See here for reference.

Panel 1 – The giant MAGOOZLA, a sort of large demon frog, is speaking to LUNATRIX (a clownish, star-faced servant). They stand outside the entrance of a train-tunnel that’s been cut into the side of an underwater mountain—they are lit by a glow that emanates from inside the tunnel (think: Smaug’s lair in Tolkien’s The Hobbit.) Around the tunnel entrance are hydrothermal vents, gushing blue-black smoke and bubbles: pale green and red tubeworms live around the vents, where they feed. Reference image. (Comic title should be incorporated into panel’s artwork in McCay style—see above.)

            TITLE: THIRTY-SOMETHING NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND

            MAGOOZLA: The Princess is inconsolable. Fetch Nemo!

            LUNATRIX: Oh, it’s been years – I pray he’ll come! 

Panel 2 – (Classic McCay side-view of bed.) NEMO, a middle-aged bearded man in t-shirt and boxer shorts, sits up in bed. He is exhausted and relieved as he has awoken out of a dream. But around him, the room is flooded up to the level of the mattress. The water is higher on the right-hand side of the panel—emphasizing that the water is coming from that direction

            NEMO: O, Mama. What a terrible dream! 

            CAPTION: {#1} Waking from a dream in which I was being waterboarded for something I hadn’t done, I discovered 

Panel 3 – Waist-deep in water, NEMO walks toward the bathroom door at the right side of the panel—his hands are raised in a gesture of disbelief. Water is pouring out of the bathroom door—as though the bathroom is completely full of water and it’s spilling over an invisible force-field into the bedroom.

            NEMO: What the what? Did I leave the faucet running? 

            CAPTION: {#2} my bedroom had flooded. I hurried toward the bathroom, keen to discover what was wrong. But I 

Panel 4 – A floating NURSE speaks to NEMO as he too floats, panicked, in a flooded train station. Because the bathroom is no longer a bathroom, but an underwater train station that is for some reason being used as a hospital. Water fills the whole panel now. The train station is like one of those London or Paris stations with the high-vaulted glass ceilings, and many parallel tracks, but only one waiting train to Slumberland. There are gurneys and operating tables on the train platforms—nurses and doctors calmly treating white-clad patients (think the M.A.S.H. operating theater as in this reference.) The tables et al are secured to the ground, but the doctors and nurses are floating in the water.

            NEMO: What…But I can’t breathe underwater!

            NURSE: Of course you can, Nemo. We’ve been able to for years! 

            CAPTION: {#3} found myself in an underwater train station being used as a triage hospital. A passing nurse calmed my 

Panel 5 – LUNATRIX waves to NEMO, who has now floated further into the station. Lunatrix is standing over a hospital gurney, holding a VHS videotape in his raised hand. On the gurney are a beat-up old cardboard box, and a glass jar filled with red flower heads. Next to the hospital gurney is a big-box TV and VHS player from the early nineties. Behind them the train to Slumberland remains visible.  

            LUNATRIX: Ah, there you are, Nemo! 

            LUNATRIX: We need to catch that bullet train to Slumberland! The princess… 

            CAPTION: {#4 } fears of drowning. Then I saw Lunatrix, and I knew I was returning to Slumberland after all these 

Panel 6—As he returns his attention to the box of videotapes, LUNATRIX hands NEMO the GLASS JAR.

            NEMO: What are you looking for?

            LUNATRIX: Here, hold this a second.


            LUNATRIX: I just need to find the home video of your birth! We can’t leave without it! 

            CAPTION: {#5} sad years! As he continued rifling through my old Star Trek videos, he handed me a jar full of beautiful 

Panel 7—NEMO opens the glass jar just a little bit. LUNATRIX, his back to NEMO, is putting a videotape into the VCR.

            NEMO: O, how beautiful! I wonder if these flowers smell like the ones…

            LUNATRIX: Is this the one? 

            CAPTION: {#6} flowers. They reminded me of the blood-colored blossoms that we saw that night by the swimming

Panel 8—NEMO drops the glass jar in shock as the blossoms inside explode into a wild thicket of reaching vines that begin to fill the panel. Hearing what NEMO said in last panel, LUNATRIX has turned to try to stop NEMO, but it’s too late. The idea here is that when water is added to these flowers, they grow like crazy—expanding without end. Like those little capsules you add water to and foam dinosaurs burst forth.         

            LUNATRIX: No, don’t open that!

            NEMO: O no!

            CAPTION: {#7} pool. But when I opened the jar, the blossoms exploded in a storm of reaching, choking vines. I tried 

Panel 9—NEMO and LUNATRIX are overtaken by the mad, flowering vines. We can see that the jar was caught by the vines before it could hit the ground. The vines and blossoms fill the whole panel—we should see faces and hands, but otherwise only solid vegetation. Red should be the overwhelming color in this panel.

            LUNATRIX: Oh no! Wait Nemo! We can still catch the train!

            NEMO: I can’t breathe! O mama, papa! 

            CAPTION: {#8} to reach Lunatrix, but the flowers were drowning me. I knew I must try to catch this train to Slumberland 

Panel 10—NEMO is back in his bedroom—he’s fallen half out of bed, tangled in his bedsheets. His toddler DAUGHTER stands next to the bed in her pajamas (covered with frogs and toads echoing MAGOOZLA a little bit), scratching her head. 

            DAUGHTER: What happened, Daddy? Did you eat more chocolate ice cream before bed? 

            CAPTION: {#9} but then I woke up.

Little Nemo in Slumberland - Out in the Cold - Grant McLaughlin

1 - Grant sits at a desk in his home, wearing his pajamas and trying to write.  He leans back in his chair, looking a bit frustrated.

NO COPY

2 - Classic Nemo character Flip walks onto the panel, wearing winter clothes.  A gust of wind blows throw, making taking up some papers / maybe Grant covers them in time.

FLIP: ...

3 - The wind dies down, but snowflakes start falling.  Grant turns from his desk to greet Flip.

GRANT: Oh hey, Flip.

FLIP: What's up?

4 - Snow starts to cover the floor.  Grant stands and talks to Flip, shivering a bit.  Flip listens intently.

GRANT (1): I don't know what to do.

GRANT (2): This week's prompt is throwing me for a loop.

FLIP: Is it bad?

5 - Grant and Flip start walking away from the desk (which is quickly being covered in snow).  The room is transforming into a literal winter wonderland - the wall is falling away (maybe already gone) and they are outside.  Snow continues to fall.  A sweater hangs from a coat rack (which looks suspiciously like a tree).

GRANT: Just the opposite.  It's really, really good.  Full of potential, but it's also super wide open.

6 - Grant is putting on the sweater (perhaps it's still covering his head).  Flip looks on in bemusement.  The snow continues - maybe there's a group of snowmen in the distance.

GRANT: I find that without enough restriction, sometimes I have a hard time knowing where to start.

7 - The group of snowmen have caught up with Flip and Grant.  One puts a hat on Grant's head (too hard, once again covering his head).

GRANT: It should be setting my creative thoughts aflame.

8 - Grant pulls off the hat to adjust it.

GRANT: Instead, it leaves me...

9 - Flip and Grant continue walking.  Grant is still shivering, despite the additional clothing (beyond the sweater and hat, he's still just wearing pajamas).  They might have to put up their hands / arms to block the snow, which continues to blow (perhaps even stronger).

GRANT: Well...

10 - Grant stops in his tracks.  Flip takes the opportunity to start making a snowball.

GRANT: It leaves me...

11 - Grant gestures to the full-on winter wonderland around them.  He's clearly quite cold - freezing even.  Flip has finished his snowball, perhaps throwing it up and down in his hand.

NO COPY

12 - Flip throws the snowball, which takes Grant full on in the face, completely covering it in the snowy impact.  Grant does not look impressed, while Flip thinks it's pretty funny.  Play this cartoony as heck (perhaps with the unimpressed eyes looking throw the snow, ala Looney Tunes).

SFX: paft!

13 - Inset panel.  Classic ending to Little Nemo strips - Grant is sitting up in bed wearing his pajamas.  His blanket is on the ground and he's shivering like crazy, as the window above him is open, letting in the cold.

GRANT: Brrr!  Who left the window open?

Why Little Nemo in Slumberland? - Colin Cheney

Many readers are no doubt already familiar with Winsor McCay’s classic comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland. But, if you’re not, they basically involve a young boy embarking on journeys into various dream realms. McCay created these dynamic, wildly colorful, 22” x 17” full-page comic strips during the first two decades of the twentieth century. And his work has influenced a great many comics creators, as well as filmmakers and children’s book authors (many kids are first introduced to Little Nemo unknowingly through Maurice Sendak’s homage to McCay, In the Night Kitchen).

So I decided to set us up with this thoughtballoons prompt—to write a dream-based comic in the spirit of McCay’s Little Nemo strips—for two reasons.

First, I thought it’d be fruitful to muck about inside the mechanics and imagination of McCay’s storytelling. A hundred years ago, McCay was confronting challenges of sequential art with which contemporary creators still wrestle. How does each panel work on its own, while contributing to the full page’s visual integrity? How does the eye move between panels, and across the page, and what effect does this movement have on the reader’s imagination? Though his style evolved over the strip’s run, McCay had very particular rules that he worked out for himself—and I wanted to see what it was like to play (roughly) by his rules.

(For example, as I worked on my own Nemo-inspired comic, I found myself thinking a lot about how McCay’s early strips set up Nemo’s adventures in the first panel. During 1905, McCay would begin each comic with a panel in which one of King Morpheus’s courtiers sets in motion a plan to fetch Nemo. During that first year of strips, Nemo never actually reaches Slumberland—some crisis emerges in the penultimate panels causing him to wake, disheveled in his bedsheets, in the final panel. While neither the dream-folks’ plan to fetch Nemo nor the boy’s own journey is achieved, the arc of each page-long story is clearly established in that first panel. I wanted to see if I could incorporate that structure and approach in my own comic.)

Second, I thought it would be interesting to muck about with actual dream material. Everyone knows that telling someone else one of your dreams nearly always leads to a glazed, bored expression. Even if we can recognize certain shared concerns or anxieties, another person’s dreams are just too specific to her own subconscious—the hodgepodge of data drifting about in each of our strange mental landscapes. But when I was reading McCay’s strips, I was struck by how he seemed to have such a good grasp on the way dreams can work: the narrative logic used in some of McCay’s early strips seemed familiar to me.

So, in putting forward this prompt to the thoughtballoons crowd, I wondered what would happen if we channeled one of our own dreams—in all its particularity and oddness—through McCay’s storytelling form. How much of a dream’s non-narrative nature can be kept intact as we translate it into a one-page story with a beginning, middle, and end? How do we write our memory of a dream for another artist — perhaps a stranger—to draw?

The story should be in the spirit of McCay’s early twentieth-century strips: usually Nemo drifting off to sleep, finding his way into Slumberland (realm of dream and nightmare), with a final panel that interrupts the dream as Nemo wakes in bed, back in the real world. The idea here is to see what happens when you give Nemo one of your own dreams or nightmares to explore.

If you like, as a bonus, mess about with McCay’s caption and dialogue style: he often included footer captions narrating each panel, plus dialogue.

For reference, there are a bunch of the strips online, but here’s a handy glimpse at a few.