sjarrell

Thanks, Lon!

Soon after Aparo passed, I bought this from his agent: Aquaman page Keep hitting the "previous" buttons at the bottom of the screen for my other favorite funnybook things, if you have the patience... Sandy, who missed this thread the first go round.

Wiseass, Wisenheimer: both one word. I heart them both.

The Times review, for those unregistered: October 17, 2005 Restoring Slumberland By SARAH BOXER The book is so huge you have to crawl over it to read it. It's 21 inches long and 16 inches wide. And cartoonists from Matt Groening to Chris Ware are going nuts over it. Winsor McCay published his first Little Nemo cartoon a century ago, on Oct. 15, 1905, in The New York Herald. The first panel shows a little boy in a nightshirt sitting up in bed staring at a clownish figure before him. The narration says: "Little Nemo had just fallen asleep when an Oomp appeared, who said, 'You are requested to appear before his majesty, Morpheus of Slumberland.' " The Oomp then presents Nemo with Somnus, a gentle horse to ride into Slumberland. So began a fantastical comic about a sleeping boy. It was an instant critical success, but the public, especially children, were lukewarm. Since then, "Little Nemo in Slumberland" has found its public. In 1966, Little Nemo was featured in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many books of Nemo reproductions followed. But Peter Maresca, a comics collector, wasn't happy, he said in a recent telephone interview. Even the best preserved pages of "Little Nemo in Slumberland" were fast deteriorating. Soon no one would be able to see them the way they originally looked. Mr. Maresca wanted, he said, to publish a selection of Little Nemo comics just the way they appeared in the Sunday funnies: in the same colors, on rough matte paper that looked like newsprint, and at the same size. He approached numerous presses, but none would take it on, he explained. Finally he went to Art Spiegelman, the founder of Raw and the author of the very large comic book "In the Shadow of No Towers," who suggested that Mr. Maresca publish it himself. So he did. It cost him, he said, something close to "the price of a three-bedroom house in Kansas." On the way to self-publishing "Little Nemo in S lumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!" (Sunday Press, $120), Mr. Maresca learned how much size really does matter to Little Nemo. In the comic of Feb. 2, 1908, Little Nemo travels through Befuddle Hall, a place where everything is elongated. The panels are stretched and squeezed. The effect at full scale is disorienting, like a funhouse mirror. "You really have the stuff spinning around you when it's that big," Mr. Maresca said. In the comic of Oct. 29, 1905, Little Nemo walks on stilts among flamingos. The panels become longer and longer as Little Nemo's situation becomes more perilous. Finally, as he falls in slow motion, the panels become progressively shorter. You can see this in smaller reproductions, Mr. Maresca explained, but the effect at full scale is different, enveloping you much the way a movie screen does. "The idea of cinema was in McCay's mind," Mr. Maresca said. In the comic of May 22, 1910, Little Nemo walks in Martian air and it looks as if a movie camera were following him through space. As he moves forward, the background fades. (So do the speech balloons, as if the sound were growing dim.) It's not only the grand cinematic things that come through at full scale. It's the little things too, like the words. Not only can you actually read them, but you can also see how they were made. Consider the strip of July 17, 1910, in which two teams of hypnotists try to put a yellow blob, the Whang-Doodle, to sleep. If you look carefully, you will see that some of the letters in those speech bubbles are blue rather than black. "At first I thought it was a mistake," Mr. Maresca said. When he took a closer look, though, he noticed that when the characters were close up, they spoke in loud black words. When they were far away they spoke in blue. "A lot of people know more about Winsor McCay, the man, than I," Mr. Maresca said. "But few know Nemo better than I, panel for panel. I think McCay drew some of these pages in less time than it took me to restore them." Even after assembling the best set of original funny pages that he could find, Mr. Maresca had to spend between 5 and 20 hours restoring each one. Some pages were so damaged that panels had to be redrawn. Color accuracy was crucial. Usually, Mr. Maresca said, a printer will try to get maximum contrast by making the background sheets pure white. But since the background sheets of old newspapers are actually different yellows, thanks to variable fading, the colors in the artwork become distorted in the correction process. Mr. Maresca ignored the imperfections in the newsprint and corrected only the color within the drawings. Then he put each on a new newsprint background. It was, he said, "a little crazy." He was after "an imperfect ideal." He said he wanted the finished product to look just as inconsistent as the original newspaper pages did. Finally, he flew to Malaysia in order to watch the pages coming off the presses. It took 60 hours to print 5,000 books. And he stayed up through almost all of it. "There was one press check I slept through," he said, and when he awoke, "I freaked out." The page still rankles him. He wouldn't say which one it was. "You have to figure it out yourself." On the Web site for the new book, sundaypressbooks.com, Mr. Spiegelman tried to explain just how different the big Little Nemo is from all the little Little Nemos. "I mean, it's as if somebody showed you a tabletop model of the Chrysler Building and said, 'It's just like that, only bigger.' " Chris Ware, the author of "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth" and the designer of some books of comic reprints, said in an e-mail message that he was rethinking the whole enterprise: "After this book, it just seems unacceptable and a disservice to the artist's memory to do it any other way." You can't get much more perfectly imperfect than that.

This should be on everyone's shopping list: Little Nemo in Slumberland NYTimes review: New York Times review I've ordered mine, but it's not here yet...

Paul- My mom was a few months short of her 54th birthday when she died. It started as breast/lymph cancer (very suddenly, between regular 6-month mammograms) and of course was eventually just everywhere. Took 2 1/2 years, all told. She was a beloved elementary school teacher and had tons of support from all around. Aside from the illness I think she had a pretty good last couple of years. Lots of love. Her mother and I took her to the gulf coast the last week she was alive. She wanted to sit on the beach in Destin. It was January, she was bundled up in god only knows how many blankets. But the sun was out, and the ocean was there. She closed her eyes and said it sounded nice. The moment we were back in Atlanta she checked out. She just needed to say goodbye to the ocean. My wife's Grandmother, 87, was diasgnosed late last year with uterine cancer. When asked if there was anything she'd like to do, she said "I suppose it'd be nice to see the ocean one more time". She's not gotten there yet, but the treatment seems to have worked, for now. So there's still time. Maybe your friend likes the ocean too? Best to you and her. Reports of cancer always make me sad. Sandy

They come so fast. Seems like just this morning I was celebrating my last birthday!

Good grief!! I just found this thread today. It's like having my birthday all over again! Thanks, everybody!

13 weeks has been the wait period for the BN titles for awhile now.

Okay. It's been 13 weeks since the first batch of RVGs this summer, I marked my calendar. Where the hell are they?!?!?!?!?

Jackie McLean. All 4 discs in the changer.

PM'd re: Burrell Christmas CD!

Not in my shop. Wish it was! PS: Thanks, Mark!

I've got one at my shop that I can sell you for less! PM me if you're interested. Sandy

It's Ike Quebec playing the tenor saxophone, late 50s-early 60s! What's not to love?

Jimmy Smith + LD & Date w/ Jimmy Smith need the Conn treatment. Then I'll be happy. JOS + horns= goodness.

It sorta depends on my mood, but it's usually the best Mosaic set ever.

IIRC the latest version of the OJC reissue CD includes both takes. ← It's not there at emusic, which is the limited edition OJC. At least that's what the pic's of...

PM Sent Re: Steppin' Out

More Hank! I need to go shopping...

Yep. Just got it last week, and it sounds great. Wonder if Mosaic will ever do a Select of Mr. Roach--wasn't his output for the label around 5 LPs? ← I've written Mosaic about that before, but no reply. It'd all fit on a Select...

Back to JOS- I may have missed it above, but just incase: At the Organ v1 & 2 will be out in Sept/Oct in the $15 TOCJ series. They're bound to get to DATE soon, right?

mcmaster tocj

The chocolate bunny graphic refuses to include itself in my quote. Snap. Anyway, thanks for the laugh, couw...

The material's all been made available on CD since the Mosaic happened- the WCC you mention is disc one, "The Best of Chet Baker Sings" is disc two, and "Quartet w/ Russ Freeman" is disc three. I don't think track order was changed, even. Enjoy the set! "Give", you say? Your friend is a friend indeed, fella.