RFG Talk: Narrating Nemo: Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and the Evolution of the Comic Strip

As one of the pioneers of the animation medium as well as the comics medium, Winsor McCay’s cultural significance is rivaled by few. However, the scholarly scrutiny of his works has yet to match his historical prominence. His most well-known creation, Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran from 1905 to 1927, was the first comic strip with an ongoing, open-ended serialized narrative. Yet, it only started off as a regular Sunday strip and over its first year of publication reached the said position, redefining the comics medium for the years to come. In this talk, Nima Bahrami will explore this notion, the narratological evolution of the first year of publication of Little Nemo, by considering the text and the image separately in order to offer an analytical explanation for the dynamics behind this process.

Nima Bahrami is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. With a double major in Architecture and Literature from the University of Tehran and a Research Masters in Literary Studies from the University of Amsterdam, his research involves theories of space and place, the comics medium, posthuman studies and the syntax-semantics interface.

Zoom attendance link here.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Ecologies Research Focus Group