Winsor McCay VS Art Speigelman

Little Nemo in Slumberland was produced by Winsor McCay (below). As Maus (above) was produced by Art Speigelman. Both men worked on their projects single-handedly to produce their brilliance.

There is a strength in the consistency of both these works that radiates throughout - as both Art and Winsor were the sole workers on these comics. No ideas are lost or interpreted differently by a team. No compromise is necessary. The job is begun and ended by the same artist who had the original thoughts.

The graphic novel of Maus if more book-like. One instinctively reads it as a storybook - merely because of our associations with previous books. There seems to be less windows and their smaller, more concise. "Spiegelman's first published version of Maus was a three-page strip, printed in 1972 in Funny Aminals (cq), an underground comic published by Apex Novelties."* The full page comic of Nemo have longer drawings stretching out the spanse of the page.

What stands out in McCays comic is that the illustration take precedence over the text. His sense of drawing perspective is quite sophisticated for the time. His sense of time movement is illustrated through the repetition of the frames, and the slight variation to show the motion. McCays illustrations have been likened to Muybridge's art with his horses and sense of time/motion manipulation. World War 2 was an imperative influence on Maus as it conveys the true story of a mans journey and survival through the holocaust.

I find in McCays Little Nemo in Slumberland that his illustration dominates the text. The dialogue is secondary to the imagery. It almost looks a little awkward in the frame. His use of panel or frame repetition to create motion and time is amazing though. His drawing perspective is advanced for the era. His use of colour is bright and characterises the pace and progression of the story.

I quite liked Maus. Mainly because of the storyline but also because of the art. The image and text are tightly united in this comic. The text almost a part of the illustration in some panels and is shown through the shape of text or speech balloons. It is spatially accounted for in the illustration and not just added as an after thought as it seems to be in Little Nemo. In Maus, the elements of text and image, both are equally important in narrating this story.

*Internet resource - Wiki.