The Cartoonist passed on a plea the other day for someone to translate a few lines of dialog from Dutch to English in an old cartoon found tucked inside a book.

The original statement of curiosity originated here, with what was clearly a Dutch translation of a Little Nemo strip printed in black and white.

I recognized McCay’s hand and thought I had a copy of the original in one book or another and asked Ralf to put me in touch with Rob. We corresponded a bit, whereupon I learned that he was unfamiliar with Winsor McCay.

I dug out the book and copied the dialog, sending it to him with some links to McCay resources on the intarweb.

I assumed that the piece was a translation of the Little Nemo original; the images I saw looked familiar as part of a long sequence in which Flip, Nemo, and the Imp are wandering through Morpheus’ castle. I have several of the Fanagraphics reprints and thought I might be able to locate the piece.

I seem to recall something about early seventies bootleg Dutch reprints of Nemo preceding US reprints by a couple of years. I may have read that these reprints influenced Joost Swarte, who so clearly has looked at McCay (among other early cartoonists) pretty closely.

McCay also is widely credited as the inventor of animation, for his Gertie the Dinosaur films, and is remembered in the ongoing Kim Deitch Waldo epic as a frustrated old man, aggravated at the way the his inheritors had commercialized the form

Here’s a wikipedia article on Nemo.

The period in the strip which the images are drawn from is known as the “Befuddle Hall” sequence.

I have it in several republications. This transcription is taken from page 110 of “the Best of Little Nemo in Slumberland,” edited by Richard Marschall.

FRAME ONE

Nemo (on the left, in policeman’s cap):
I wish we had never come into this Befuddle Hall in the first place.

Flip (to right, in cap, appears bearded and with cigar):
That isn’t the question now, it’s how are we going to get out.

FRAME TWO
N: The whole affair seems to be sideways. It makes me dizzy.
F: There’s a hall running up and down and crossways! Don’t fall in, now, hear?

FRAME THREE
N: Let’s give ourselves up when we get out of here, eh, Flip?
F: Let’s get out first! Whoever named this Befuddle Hall knew his business!

FRAME FOUR
N (to the Imp): Come on! You slowpoke! Hurry up! Don’t be so slow!
F: I see daylight! Come on! Hurry up!

FRAME FIVE
N: We’ll hunt up the princess now, eh? And go back to the palace!
F: Yes! There’s the door to this befuddle place yonder!

FRAME SIX
I: Pug ug umble guck!
N (losing cap): I’m so glad we are going to get out of here!
F: I told you I’d find the way out, did I not, eh?

FRAME SEVEN
N: Yes! You did not! We are as bad off as ever!
F: Huh! This beats me! I’m certainly, um, twisted! the only thing we can do is go back again!

FRAME EIGHT
N: (having fallen out of bed and awakened): Huh! I was wondering why everything looked so sidewise like!

—

Every single installment of Little Nemo in Slumberland ends with Nemo awakening on the floor in a smaller frame. There is a wonderful sequence which starts with him in bed, and the bed grows legs and gallops over the city wildly until he awakens, having fallen out of bed.

The strip Rob found has an original publication date of 1908, and is drawn from a several-weeks sequence known as “Befuddle Hall.”

There was a very terrible animated film adaptation of the strip made in the 1990s. In the US in the seventies, a wonderful animated campaign for Levis’ pants made heavy and direct use of imagery and sequences originating in the strips, but wildly psychedelicized in the nineteen-seventies idiom.

Performing a google image search on the quoted term “little nemo” seems to yield a number of scans of the strip in color, as it was originally published. The strip was an anchor of the American sunday comics supplement and original rotgoravured pages are sought-after collectibles (I have never seen one in real life).

Anyway, there’s a ton of stuff out there of Nemo and on McCay. If you can find it, “Little Nemo 1905-1914” may contain every strip from the greatest period. This edition was published by the Evergreen Press (a subthing of Taschen), has an introductioun by Bill Blackbeard, and the ISBN is 3-8228-6300-9.

Rob also blogged our correspondence, upon which this post is based.