Chicago: A History in Block-Print

These linoleum-block prints were created by a group of design students under the direction of Clara MacGowan, assistant professor of art at Northwestern University. They were published in 1934 in an oversized paperbound portfolio, accompanied by captions by James Alton James, a professor of American history at the same institution.

The prints were presented in chronological order, beginning with Marquette and Joliet in 1673 and concluding with several images of the Century of Progress exposition of 1933. Some of the earlier images may now seem a bit trite (log cabins, Indians attacking a woman with a hatchet, and so on), and the level of command of the medium among the various students varies, but many of the architectural scenes are quite vigorous and appealing. In the selection below I have included the subject of each print and the name of the artist responsible, but have omitted the historical captions.


University Hall, Northwestern University (Josephine McCarty)


The Tribune Tower (Louise Ebeling Dean)


The University of Chicago Chapel (C. Dean Chipman)


The Daily News Building (Alice Rose Dedouch)


The Chicago Civic Opera House (Dorothy Aires Westerdahl)


The Deering Library, Northwestern University (Hannah Jewett)
With one ambiguous exception -- C. Dean Chapman -- the students were apparently all women. It would be interesting to know whether any of them continued their printmaking activities after graduation.

Japanese Katazome Calendars

According to Wikipedia,

"Katazome (型染め) is a Japanese method of dyeing fabrics using a resist paste applied through a stencil. With this kind of resist dyeing, a rice flour mixture is applied using a brush or a tool such as a palette knife. Pigment is added by hand-painting, immersion or both. Where the paste mixture covers and permeates the cloth, dye applied later will not penetrate."

In addition to its use on fabrics, the intricate stencil technique has been employed in printmaking on mulberry paper, as in the page-a-month wall calendars that have been produced regularly in Japan since the 1940s. They may possibly have been intended for Western markets, since the months, as in these examples from 1959, are in English.













The above images are from a set that apparently matches the one that George C. Baxley, one of the few English-language sources on the subject, says is "reported" to be the work of Keisuke Serizawa (1895-1984), a noted textile designer who created a katazome calendar annually for forty years or so.

The next image is an example of the label that would have accompanied each set of prints. This label happens to be an orphan, artist unknown.


This rather nice crab may belong with it, as the dates align correctly with March 1957.


Finally, some images I can't assign definitely to any particular year or designer, although they may belong together. Based on where the days of the week fall they could be from 1959, 1964, 1970, and so on.




When they were given to me a number of years ago, the prints were accompanied by a photocopied page that says, in part, "the Artist for this calendar for 1971 is Mr. Takeshi Nishijima, Professor of Art at Kyoto University. A graphic and textile designer, he has exhibited in numerous one man shows and won the coveted Grand Prize at the Kyoto Art Exhibit." As far as I can tell, however, none of the above examples are from 1971, and thus far I've found very little information on Takeshi Nishijima. He appears to have been active through the 1970s, producing calendars that were published by Wazome-Kogei in Kyoto.

The Japan Society in New York plans an exhibition devoted to Keisuke Serizawa beginning in October 2009. His katazome calendars, even if a sideline to his more important work (he was designated as a "Living National Treasure" in 1956) may well be represented. Yale University Press will publish the exhibition catalog, Serizawa: Master of Japanese Textile Design, also in the Fall.

(I have reworked the above since I first posted it, adding more images and moving one set to a subsequent post.)

Japanese Government Railways Tourist Library

A recent post at A Journey Round My Skull reminded me about these pamphlets, which were published in the 1930s and early '40s as part of efforts by the Board of Tourist Industries of the state-owned Japanese Government Railways to promote travel in the country.

Joseph Rogala's A Collector's Guide to Books on Japan in English (Routledge, 2001) describes the series:

"One of the better short essay series on specific cultural information on Japan. Most are still available, not only in rare book stores but in used book stores as well. The first of the series, Tea Cult of Japan, was published in 1934; the last, Japanese National Character, No. 40, coming out in 1942. Some of the latter numbered booklets - thirty-five to forty - are more difficult to find, particularly number thirty-nine, Hand-made Paper of Japan. Many of the authors of these little gems have published other books in their specialties. Subsequent editions, most in hard cover, were published after the war. [...] Some of these little booklets were issued with onion paper covers, though most are now found without them."

The following editorial note was included at the beginning of some or all of the volumes:

"It is a common desire of tourists to learn something of the customs, manners, and culture of the countries they visit, but flying visits merely for sightseeing furnish neither the time nor opportunity for more than a passing acquaintance with the life of the people. The Board of Tourist Industry recognizes this difficulty and is endeavoring to meet it by publishing this series of brochures.

"The present series will, when completed, consist of more than a hundred volumes, each dealing with a different subject, but all co-ordinated. By studying the entire series the foreign student of Japan will, we hope, gain a general knowledge of the country and its people."

Once Japan was at war with all of the major English-speaking countries there was obviously no point in continuing to issue further volumes, and the project was abandoned well short of the projected hundred. In the list that follows I have not attempted to reproduce the diacriticals over some of the vowels, and I have left some spellings (i.e. "Hirosige") as they originally appeared in lists found within the volumes.

1. Tea Cult of Japan by Y. Fukuhita, B.A.
2. Japanese Noh Plays by Prof. T. Nogami, D. Litt.
3. Sakura (Japanese Cherry) by M. Miyosi, D. Sc.
4. Japanese Gardens by Prof. M. Tatui
5. Hirosige and Japanese Landscapes by Prof. Yone Noguti, D. Litt.
6. Japanese Drama by B. T. I. (sic)
7. Japanese Architecture by Prof. H. Kisada, D. Sc.
8. What is Shinto? by Prof. G. Kato, D. Litt.
9. Castles in Japan by Prof. S. Orui, D. Litt. and Prof. M. Toba
10. Hot Springs in Japan by Prof. K. Huzinami, M. D.
11. Floral Art of Japan by Issotei Nisikawa
12. Children's Days in Japan by Z. T. Iwado, B. A.
13. Kimono (Japanese Dress) by Ken-iti Kawakatu
14. Japanese Food by Prof. Kaneko Tezuka
15. Japanese Music by Katsumi Sunaga
16. Zyudo (Zyuzyutu) by Zigoro Kano
17. Family Life in Japan by Syunkiti Akimoto
18. Scenery of Japan by T. Tamura, D. Sc.
19. Japanese Education by Prof. K. Yosida, D. Litt. and Prof. T. Kaigo
20. Floral Calendar of Japan by T. Makino, D. Sc. and Genziro Oka
21. Japanese Buddhism by Prof. D. T. Suzuki, D. Litt.
22. Odori (Japanese Dance) by Kasyo Matida
23. Kabuki Drama by Syutaro Miyake
24. Japanese Wood-Block Prints by Prof. S. Huzikake, D. Litt.
25. History of Japan by Prof. K. Nakamura, D. Litt.
26. Japanese Folk-Toys by Tekiho Nisizawa
27. Japanese Game of "Go" bu Hukumensi Mihori
28. Japanese Coiffure by R. Saito, D. Litt
29. Japanese Sculpture by Seiroku Noma
30. Japanese Postage Stamps by Yokiti Yamamoto
31. Japan's Ancient Armor by Hatiro Yamagami
32. Angling in Japan by Meizi Matuzaki
33. Japanese Proverbs by Otoo Huzui, D. Litt.
34, Sumo (Japanese Wrestling) by Kozo Hikoyama
35. Japanese Birds by Prince Nobosuke Takatukasa
36. Ainu Life and Legends by Kyosuke Kindaiti, D. Litt.
37. Japanese Family Crests by Yuzura Okada
38. Japanese Industrial Arts by Seiiti Okuda
39. Hand-Made Paper of Japan by Bunsyo Zyugaku
40. Japanese National Character by N. Hasegawa

D. T. Suzuki's name leaps out as probably the most familiar one to Western audiences, but the writers in general appear to have been recognized authorities rather than hacks. There's no indication, at least in the volumes I've examined, of who was responsible for the translations.

The papermaking volume -- which isn't as hard to come by as Joseph Rogala suggests -- features some nice sepia-toned photos as well as tipped-in paper samples such as the one on the left-hand page below. It's not as elaborate as Dard Hunter's limited-edition A Paper-making Pilgrimage to Japan, Korea and China (which is mentioned in the bibliography of the Tourist Library pamphlet), but it's a not a bad little book itself.


The approach, or at least the terminology, in the Ainu volume may now strike us as, well, a little quaint:

"What is, then, the constitutional characteristic of the Ainu? The most conspicuous is, as is commonly believed, that he is hairy. This used once exaggeratedly [sic] to be reported, but it has been proved that he is neither more nor less hairy than the white man. Many Ainu people have wavy hair, but some straight black hair. Very few of them have wavy brownish hair. Their skins are generally reported to be light brown. But this is due to the fact that they labor on the sea and in briny winds all day. Old people who have long desisted from their outdoor work are often found to be as white as western men. The Ainu have broad faces, beetling eyebrows, and large sunken eyes, which are generally horizontal and of the so-called European type. Eyes of the Mongolian type are hardly found among them. In view of these points some scholars are of opinion that the Ainu are a white race. It is not unreasonable, therefore, that this opinion is gradually gaining ground among ethnologists."


At least a small number of these books have been reprinted within the last years by Routledge, although the price (around $160) is likely to deter most buyers.

Also published by the Tourist Board although not actually numbered as part of the series is the little book on Shinto shrines shown below, which unlike the other pamphlets is bound according to the traditional Japanese method. That is, the trimmed edges of the signatures are tied together with a ribbon, leaving the foredges uncut and the hidden versos of each numbered page blank. As is the case with the Tourist Library books, the cover illustration is pasted on rather than printed on the cover wrapper itself.


In hindsight, of course, these books take on an added significance, given that they were being published as Japan was expanding its empire in Asia and preparing for war with the US and Britain. The impulse behind their publication was not necessarily in conflict with those other developments, in which, naturally, the Japanese Government Railways was also very involved. Still, it's hard not to see in them a hint of what might have been had events taken a different turn.

Update (2015): "Re-envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th-Century Visual and Material Culture," an online project at the University of Rochester, has a section devoted to the Tourist Library.

The abandoned

Let's get one thing straight: there was no Ariel. That was only the first of his countless lies. Here's another one: he had no magic, no book. It was all me. When I found them on the rocks -- him and his daughter -- they were half-drowned, at death's door. I revived them, conjured food and drink from thin air, built him a palace from sea foam. I was his architect, his slave, his whore. At his bidding I assumed the form of a woman, a boy, whatever he wanted. I took on other likenesses as well, ones he might find uncomfortable to talk about. I passed no judgment -- that was of his world.


In the end, of course, he was "rescued," restored. When he promised me that he would come back to me, in time, I knew better than to believe him. I could have killed him -- all of them -- right then, but the truth is, my one weakness, I loved him. I let him go.

Though I can't cross the water I know all things. I know how he mocked and slandered me, calling me hideous, a monster, the whelp of a witch -- I who have existed from the beginning of time. But my anger burned itself out long ago. He's dead now, as are they all. And no one will ever find this island again. I will see to that.

The sea

The boats are returning to the harbor now, one by one, the reflection of their torches flaring across the water in the last moments of twilight. Tired and grim-faced -- it's been a bad day's haul, it seems -- the fisherman will pull along the docks, tie up, and silently unload their catch. From where I stand, along the rocks where the jetty meets the long, grey beach, I can't see their faces, but I know each one of them by name, I know their thoughts, I know their wives, and I teach most of their children.

The policemen have completed their enquiries and have left town. They haven't said as much, but I know they won't be back. They will file their report -- missing person, no evidence foul play -- the folder will be neatly tucked into a cabinet in the district office, and no one will ever look at it again. It's always the same. As far as the authorities are concerned, keeping track of the activities of the living is responsibility enough; expecting them to bother with the affairs of those who have disappeared without trace would be asking too much, and in the end what good would it do, anyway?

My mother was the first person in the long history of this village to be able to read and write, and had she not given birth to me she could very easily have been the last. She wasn't from here, naturally. Her birthplace was twelve miles inland, in a real town with lamps and cast-iron fences, newspapers and brightly lit cafés. When she was nineteen, having already lost both parents, she came here with some friends on a lark and, as the result of a series of circumstances the nature of which I was never allowed by my mother to have more than the vaguest knowledge, never left. It would be appealing to be able to say that she stayed because she fell in love with the village or with my father, but I'm not sure that either was ever true. Be that as it may she remained all the same, and in time I was born.

My mother was never able to teach my father to do anything more than write his name -- a skill I'm quite certain he never employed when he was out of her sight -- but she saw to it, in spite of our poverty, that I was supplied with books, paper, and writing implements, and she pointedly neglected my instruction in the tasks that in the village are customarily allotted to girls, namely gathering seaweed and shellfish, tending to the gardens, and looking after infants, one's own or those of other people. My mother put on no airs about her own original station in life nor did she entertain any illusions about how far she had descended from that condition in consenting to marry my father, but she regarded herself as a civilized women and civilized women did not muck about in tide pools and lazy beds. My mother performed her obligatory household duties, the unending cycles of cooking, cleaning, and laundering, without complaint, but she never suggested to me that these activities were sufficient to constitute one's mission in life. Since it seemed unlikely that I would ever leave here or find a suitable husband, her fixed intention was that I become the village's teacher and instruct the children in the rudiments of literacy, arithmetic, and religion. Had it not been for the burden of attending to me and my father, a burden that increased after my father's health began to fail, she might well have taken up the task herself. As it was, by the time my father went to his grave her own health had begun prematurely to decline. I was already sixteen and therefore, in my mother's judgment, sufficiently prepared to see to the village's education. She persuaded her neighbors -- with what kind of arm twisting I will never know -- to entrust their offspring to my tutelage in exchange for a few coins a week, enough to pay for a few supplies and my own very modest requirements for food, firewood, and other necessities. I have never harbored any illusions about the lasting effect I have had on my charges, but at the very least I know that they will not be as ignorant as their parents.

There were two policemen this time. The older one, the one who seemed to be in charge, seemed familiar, though he didn't appear to remember me. They always come around to me eventually. The villagers are a close-lipped lot, and even when they do decide to let on a bit their ramblings don't appear to make much sense, at least to outsiders. I, on the other hand, know everyone in this village, I understand their ways, and I'm happy to tell the policemen whatever it is they want to know. The missing man lived in a cabin along the harbor; he lived alone; he drank no more than anyone else; he had no enemies one night that might not be his friends again the next. And so on. They enquire, as discreetly and indirectly as they can, about his relations with women; I tell them plainly what I know or may have heard.

In the end I really haven't told them very much at all, but it's all they need or want to hear. What they don't want to hear is what no one has told them but what everyone in the village knows: that no trace of the man will be found, that no witness to his fatal last moments will come forward, that no bloody footprints will be found leading into the brush.

For the most part, the people who live in this village die in one of three ways: by drowning, by drinking, or at the point of a knife. Little given to reflection or sentiment, they fear none of the three. What they do fear has no name -- for how can you name something that no one has ever seen? -- and if the police have gotten wind of it, one way or another, as they make their way around the village, through some slip of the tongue or muttered aside, they lift their pencils from their notebooks and pretend they haven't heard. Only later, perhaps at the very end of their interview with me, as they stand awkwardly before the door, their questions concluded but still held back as if by magnetic force, will they allude to what people are hinting but what of course is nothing but ignorant nonsense and superstition, that the disappeared man has been taken by something silent and unseen, something that visits the shore only after long intervals and only on the blackest, coldest, mistiest nights, something that lifts latches and subdues without sound and that leaves no evidence of a struggle behind. And I'll tell them that yes, that's what the people think, and that's what they have always believed, and if they ask me if I believe it I'll tell them that what I believe or don't believe doesn't matter. And the younger policeman might suggest that couldn't it be true that the vanished man might simply have succumbed to madness and alcohol, that he might have lost his mind in the depths of night and strode out into the sea and drowned, and I will tell them that yes he might well have but that they can scour the shoreline from now until doomsday and nobody will ever find his body.

Barley

Homage to Koizumi Yakumo

The old woman was sweeping the dust out of her doorway when she caught sight of the traveler approaching along the crest of the ridge. She was not alarmed. Visitors to her windswept plot of ground were uncommon, but not unknown. She was quite certain that none had yet come this year, before today, but she thought she remembered one the year before. Or maybe it had been longer than that; she wasn't sure.

The traveler had risen that morning in the chill of dawn in the village where he had spent the night. He had asked someone to point the way and then climbed through the morning fog, walking-stick in hand, until he reached the high ground. When the forest thinned out and the last wisps of mist danced away he paused for a moment to take in the view, which stretched all the way to blue water and tree-covered islands in the distance.

A plume of gray smoke was slowly drifting upwards from the solitary windowless hut, which occupied the center of a little hollow protected from the summit's fiercest winds. Surrounding the hut on all sides was a field of knee-high barley, still green and not ready to bear.

He hailed her as he approached the clearing, and she bowed and beckoned him to sit. He squatted for a moment, then sat back against the wall of the hut, just outside the door. The woman disappeared within, and when she came out again, which was almost immediately, she was cradling a wooden bowl filled with barley in her hands. There was a wooden spoon -- more of a paddle really -- in the bowl; he knew that she had probably just used it herself but didn't mind. He smiled and nodded his gratitude. She stood beside him, beaming, as he began to eat, cooling the steaming gruel with his breath.

She remained a little wary of the stranger. She thought that he seemed like he might be some kind of ghost, and that his travels might be enforced expiation for his sins in a past life, but he didn't seem like a gaki or any other class of suffering demon, so perhaps his misdeeds had not after all been so serious. There were many kinds of spirits on the mountain and she knew that most would offer her no harm. He didn't seem to require anything of her. He was wearing a heavy, dark overcoat and was bearded, like an Emishi -- she had seen members of that tribe once or twice in her youth -- and although he spoke the ordinary language he spoke it in an odd way, and some of what he said she couldn't understand, though she pretended to and he didn't seem to notice. She decided that he must have come from afar, from another island even.

She went back inside the hut and returned to the stove. Grasping the handle of her iron kettle with a cloth she poured water over powdered tea in the only cup she owned, then beat it with a whisk she had fashioned from a twig. When she emerged again, reaching the tea towards him, she saw that he had taken a little book from his pocket and was writing in it with a pencil. She stood above him and watched this activity with great interest, though if she had ever learned in her long-distant youth how to interpret the signs he was making she had by now forgotten. She thought that perhaps he was keeping an accounting of the sins that he was purging off, one by one, as he traveled, and it made her happy to think that he was recording an ample number of them even as she watched. He paid no attention to her and seemed very intent on what he was doing, sipping the tea at intervals, until at last he folded the book closed, returned it to his pocket, and nodded at her with satisfaction. He had drained the cup and when she scuttled inside and filled it again he did not refuse a second; the walk had made him thirsty and the hot liquid produced a welcome warmth inside his chest.

When he was done he stood, picked up his walking-stick, and dusted off his coat. The woman spoke a blessing, he pronounced one on her in return, and he continued on his way without further formalities. She watched him until he was out of sight.

He continued along the ridge for another hour or more, until the terrain began to break up into a jumble of jagged, inaccessible outcroppings. At the end of the afternoon, after a rugged descent, he came into a village in a clearing at the base of the ridge. When he spoke to the villagers of his visit to the old woman's hut they were quite insistent that there was no such dwelling and no such woman, that no one had ever lived on the summit of the mountain, certainly not within their lifetimes.

Winsor McCay's Natural History

All of the Little Nemo pages below are from the collections of the Comic Strip Library. Click through the images for the original full-sized versions.




The last pair of images have occasioned rumors about McCay's possible interest in hallucinogenic plants and fungi.

Winsor McCay (II): Unreal City

McCay's work had its limitations. His dialogue is, for the most part, utterly lifeless, and displays none of the dazzling wordplay and pitch-perfect ear for the rich variety of American dialects displayed by his contemporary George Herriman, the brilliant creator of Krazy Kat. And there's no getting around the unfortunate racial stereotype represented by Nemo's sidekick Impie, who with his grass skirt, grunting gibberish, and apelike features actually predated Little Nemo, having first appeared, with his fellows, in McCay's early feature A Tale of the Jungle Imps. Some of the thematic material he worked into the strip -- the dragons, princesses, beasts, and savages -- was drawn from the stock situations and characters of adventure and fantasy stories, even if it's true that later creators (notably Walt Disney) would in their turn draw heavily on McCay for inspiration. Little Nemo debuted just a few years after the first Oz stories, and at its weakest it has some of the same preciousness without any of Baum's talent for spinning out a sustained and coherent narrative. But for imaginative daring, and above all for the originality and vitality of his artwork, McCay had few peers. At his best he leaves clichés and stereotypes behind and brings us into a world that is entirely his own.



The above strip is particularly interesting both for what it is and what it isn't. The surreal menace of buildings that sprout legs and chase the children is perhaps not completely unprecedented (one thinks of Baba Yaga and her house with chicken legs in Russian folklore), but it's unexpected and uncanny nonetheless, and the way McCay slowly draws us into an awareness of what is going on is masterful. But there's something noteworthy about the exterior scenes, which is that they don't show any indication of the cosmopolitan cityscape that, c. 1909, was sprouting up in Manhattan, Chicago, and other great metropolises. Street scenes like this still existed in every large city, of course, as they continue to do in sections of New York City (though the absence of parked cars tips us off that this is not 2009), but there's nothing in the lower eight panels that could not have been drawn, say, fifty years earlier.

But then there is this sequence; fleeing from a pair of red, bearded giants, Nemo and Impie, transformed into giants themselves, are, in a deft bit of visual sleight-of-hand, suddenly carried aloft. They race over farms and suburbs, finally coming to rest in the center of an ethereal city.



In the next panel, which again is brightly illuminated, a crowd gathers around the pair in the heart of what must have been a fairly realistic depiction of Manhattan in McCay's heyday, but as they scale the surrounding buildings and make their way to the harbor one tall structure after another sprouts up, until they are surrounded by a dense forest of skyscrapers that stretches right to the water's edge.





The interesting thing is that the Manhattan skyline that these images suggest -- and surely Manhattan, where McCay worked, was the inspiration -- did not yet exist (and arguably still doesn't). New skyscrapers were being constructed at a rapid clip in various parts of the city, but the New York waterfront still retained a mix of low buildings and high rises. Here, for instance, from the New York Public Library's collections, is a photo of the North River (Hudson) piers, from 36th St. to 48th St., taken just months after McCay's drawing appeared:



We see a few large buildings relatively close to the harbor, but most of them are set well inland, and the immediate waterfront skyline is like a mouth with missing teeth. And only a few years before an Edison photographer had shot this moving picture footage of lower Manhattan, from Fulton Street to the Battery, recording the condition of the other portion of the island that was undergoing rapid modernization:



McCay, a superb draftsman, was perfectly capable of drawing realistic cityscapes. Here's a fine sequence of views of Chicago as Nemo and his companions approach it by airship.



And here, in a bird's eye view, is how Manhattan probably did appear, more or less, in the first decade of the 20th century -- bearing in mind that neither McCay nor likely anyone else would as yet have had the opportunity to actually view at from that angle.



Now it could be argued, and is doubtless true at least in part, that McCay was simple looking ahead and extrapolating when he drew the scene of Nemo and Impie emerging from the columns of towers. But I think it's at least equally true that he had no intention of drawing a literal city, either an existing one or one projected for the decades to come. Instead, he captured the psychological and social effects that the 20th-century city created, the sense of vastness, of totality, it provoked. We are no longer in the Dickensian warrens of the 19th-century metropolis. Seemingly self-created, looming out of all human scale, this new city is neither horrifying nor sheltering, but it will be an inescapable organizing and centering presence in the lives of all who live in it. It will be in cities like this -- not in aristocratic palaces or Rockwellian small towns -- that the course of the years that lay ahead will be determined. The century that he heralds, though McCay does not know it yet, will be a century of cities, of urban high-rises, subways, and expressways, of mass movements and mass production, of Stalinism and Fascism and the bombing of cities from the air, of Beirut and Grozny, and, just beyond its final cusp, of the fall of the Twin Towers.

Winsor McCay (I)

Now that we may have entered the twilight of the newspaper, this may be as good a time as any to look over some souvenirs from what was, at least visually, its Golden Age.

In the course of his career, Winsor McCay (1867-1934) was a pioneer animator, a theatrical impressario, and an editorial cartoonist, among other things, but above all he was one of the supreme visionary geniuses of the newspaper comic, an art form that reached its creative peak a century ago and has -- in all frankness and despite the good work of a number of fine individual creators -- been slowly coasting downhill ever since. Imagine this in your Sunday supplement (click through for a full-sized version):



That's a sample from McCay's best-known strip (and of course the word "strip" doesn't do justice to this elaborate full-page layout), Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran, on and off and under various names, from 1905 to the late 1920s. (All of the McCay images here are from the wonderful archive maintained at the Comic Strip Library.)

McCay, who was born in 1867 or thereabouts (the original birth records have been lost), had already been drawing cartoons professionally for several years, first in Cincinnatti and later for James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald, when he began Little Nemo. A year earlier he had begun what would become his other important newspaper project, Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend. The two strips would run concurrently for years, and McCay, no slouch, would continue to create other work on a regular basis as well.



Week after week the framing premise of Rarebit Fiend was unchanging: a man, or occasionally a woman, is captured in a horrifying or bizarre predicament, but in the last frame we learn that it's all been a dream, the consequence of the supposedly oneirogenic properties of the Welsh rarebit he or she has rashly consumed before retiring. The genius of the strip lay in McCay's ability to come up with an apparently inexhaustible supply of phantasmagorical variations, as both thematically and artistically he breaks new ground week after week. He plays with the dimensions of the frames, makes sophisticated self-referential jokes (one character is gradually obscured by ink blots from the artist's pen), and provokes an impressive array of unsettling horrors and fears. (The "buried alive" scenario above, of course, recapitulates Poe's nightmarish tale "The Premature Burial.")

One thing that Rarebit Fiend lacked, though, was momentum, for the strip had no narrative progression from week to week. Little Nemo, on the other hand, had a continuing story line, one which, though interrupted at the end of each week's installment, would resume where it had left off in each succeeding episode. McCay couldn't quite let go of the framing device: again we have a dreamer, this time always the same child, who awakens in bed -- or tumbling out of it -- in the last panel. But now there is a guiding narrative: at the strip's inception, on October 15, 1905, Nemo has been summoned by a messenger from King Morpheus of Slumberland, and everything that happens after that, all of his colorful, farflung adventures, will flow inexorably from that first action.

The episode below, however, is an exception, a one-off for the Thanksgiving holiday, which is why the outsized turkey is literally turning the tables, not to mention the whole house, on the human inhabitants. The lake the boy falls into is filled with cranberry sauce.



I'm not the one to provide an overall assessment or description of the riches (and weaknesses) of Little Nemo. Its best years were from 1905 to 1911, before McCay left Bennett's Herald and moved on to work for William Randolph Hearst; thereafter the strip, though still interesting, lost much of its visual daring as it became confined to a fixed grid of identically sized frames.

What I'd like to focus on, though, is just one aspect of Little Nemo at its peak, namely the way McCay imagined and depicted modern urban space. I'll address that in my next post.

J. G. Ballard (1930-2009)

J. G. Ballard died on Sunday. The BBC, in its report of his death, refers to him, perhaps a tad dismissively, as a "cult author." The label is actually a fairly amusing one, though probably not in the way it was intended. The image of Ballard the author as the central figure of an curiously focused, obscurely depraved post-apocalyptic cult would have fit comfortably into several of his curiously focused, obscurely depraved post-apocalyptic novels, and I think the description might well have raised a wry chuckle from the man himself.

As far as I can figure, of the sequence of his most typically "Ballardian" novels, which make up a substantial but not exhaustive subset of his output, I've read The Drowned World, The Drought, The Crystal World, Concrete Island, and The Day of Creation. Each is essentially a variation on a single theme: a hero, who may be a physician or other professional (Ballard had some medical training), is thrust into a situation defined by extreme environmental distress, either because of some global catastrophe or because of some freak local occurrence. Events take place, characters come and go and return again, all more or less without discernible pattern. These books have a great deal of affinity, in their basic premises, with H. G. Wells's science fiction or with John Wyndham's wonderful novel The Day of the Triffids. But the sense of aimlessness and the emotional detachment in Ballard's narratives are very much his own, and may incidentally go a long way towards explaining his appeal to postmodern audiences.

Among his other works, I read The Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, both of them at least semi-autobiographical and drawing (the former in whole, the latter only in part) from Ballard's experiences as a civilian internee in Japanese-occupied China during the Second World War. (Spielberg adapted The Empire of the Sun as a flawed but respectful movie.) I didn't much care for the brief suburban nightmare called Running Wild, which felt too much like Ballard was only going through the motions, and I never got very far into Crash -- frequently cited as one of his most iconic works -- which was filmed, rather tiresomely, by David Cronenberg. Ballard also wrote a number of tight, venomous stories, some of which are quite good indeed.

His works are sometimes described as prophetic, in that they addressed issues like global warming long before most people were aware of them, but Ballard was not for the most part a speculative writer. His gift was not so much the ability to peer into the future as it was the knack of looking at the present world and seeing things that most of us are unable to discern. In any case, much of what he saw belonged to internal, not external, landscapes. As is often the case with prophets, his insight carried a bit of a downside: it was to be waved off as a genre writer, a "cult author." And yet his influence on younger writers has been widespread and profound.

It's a bit of a cliché to say that the barren, devastated geographies through which many of Ballard's fictional characters wander were influenced by the wasteland he lived in during the war, but there's no question that going, for instance, from The Empire of the Sun to The Drought does not entail a major shift in style or theme. Of course many people -- including some writers -- had similar wartime experiences, but they didn't write J. G. Ballard novels.