The good ol' comic strip, a staple of the American Sunday paper and morning breakfast.

For this week, I looked at several strips, starting with Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland which ran from 1905 to 1911. I loved the visual storytelling McCay was able to achieve in his clever use of panel space and progression. His clear progression in character action managed to create the effect that the strip were playing out like an animated film; no surprise when McCay eventually did turn his cartoons into animations. Perhaps my favorite part of his work in this series was his ability to convey the dreamlike sensation by allowing there to be those quiet moments where Little Nemo seems to be floating in negative space. McCay isn't afraid to let the the comic take a breath, and it's these quiet moments that speak the most to me.

This leads me to the one issue I had with McCay's work, along with many other early comic strips such as Krazy Kat. Sometimes there's just too much text! The sheer amount of words was too overwhelming for me, which initially set me aback at first when I first took a glance at the strips. The speech bubbles often obscured the flow of the comic or were very difficult to read due to how tightly the words were cropped into the bubble (shout out to all the letterers out there today and the amazing work they do).

On the other hand, Ernie Bushmiller's comic strip Nancy from the 1930's appears to be much like a comic strip we might see in today's paper in it's way it delivers a simple visual gag through somewhere around two to four panels. It is certainly a much simpler strip compared to McCay's Little Nemo, but I think it's interesting to see two different takes on how to handle a comic strip.

It's pretty amazing how far comic strips have changed. What's more awesome to see these influences stay strong to this day, where we get to see Little Nemo get a modern remake in 2014 as Little Nemo: Return to Slumberland by IDW publishing, which I think I'll definitely have to check out one day.