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Comic strip · original lettering, 1906
Little Nemo in Slumberland: The Reception
Winsor McCay·New York Herald, 1906·10 lines
Nemo arrives in Slumberland to a royal welcome: a brass band, a crowd, and four queens made of ice cream. Ten speech balloons in plain English, and a telegram to the king in the newspaper prose of 1906.
Two levels on one page
The speech balloons are short and plain, about A2. The telegram further down is written newspaper English from 1906 and is a good deal harder. Read the balloons first and stop there if that is enough for today. The telegram will still be here.
The harder layer
Aerial Telegram
Drawn into the title banner at the top of the page. This is the same evening, reported to the king in the English of a 1906 newspaper. Read the balloons first, then come back to this.
0:00
BetaAudio read-along is new, and we’re still fine-tuning the word-by-word timing, so a word may drift now and then.
His Majesty King Morpheus
Little Nemo landed this evening at 8.30. amid great rejoicing. The populace went wild. He was greeted by the Confection Queens Vanilla, Pineapple, Chocolate and Strawberry just as you ordered and they in turn tendered him a reception.
I regret to say he was not able to remain asleep and all attempts to soothe him failed. I have ordered the cause of it all jailed. I hope next week to send you better news.
Words light up as they are read aloud. Tap any word to see what it means and add it to your vocabulary list.
About this page
Winsor McCay drew Little Nemo in Slumberland for the New York Herald from 1905. Every page is one dream, and every page ends the same way: in the last panel Nemo falls out of bed, or wakes, and the dream is over. Knowing the ending in advance costs nothing, because the page is about the trip, not the twist. What McCay was doing with the panels themselves was new. He changes their size and shape to match what is happening, so a crowd gets a panoramic strip across the page and waking up gets one small square. That is why this shelf reads panel by panel: at the size of a phone, a whole newspaper page is a postage stamp, and McCay drew for the page.
Scanned page from the Internet Archive, marked Public Domain Mark 1.0. Published 1906, so copyright has expired everywhere.
Check what you remember
5 quick questions about the page. Scroll up to re-read any time.
Question 1
Who is the telegram written to?
Question 2
The four queens are named after
Question 3
When the driver shouts "Whoa! John! You stand still or I’ll club you", he is threatening to
Question 4
How does the page end?
Question 5
The telegram says the attempts to soothe Nemo failed. This means
0 of 5 answered
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