Dream a Dream of Public Domain

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This piece first ran on Splice Today
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“Now that most of Winsor’s work is public domain he can be imitated by lesser artists with a fraction of his skill and vision,” artist Fil Barlow quips in his contribution to the kickstarter-funded Winsor McCay tribute anthology Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream. The volume — paying homage to the famous newspaper comic in which Nemo falls asleep each night, dreams fantastical dreams, and then falls out of bed into waking in the last panel, —features an embarrassment of talent. Starting with Gerhard’s magnificent Escher-like frontispiece, the oversize volume, which ran a successful  kickstarter campaign, includes ravishing full page works by Craig Thompson, Bill Sienkiewicz, P. Craig Russell, Jill Thompson, Carla Speed McNeil, and just about everyone else you can think of in the world of comics.

And yet, despite the skill on display, Barlow’s snark still has bite. If there’s one person in the world of illustration who’s inimitable, that person would be Winsor McCay, with his walking beds and giant dragons and monstrous geese, his inexhaustible drawing facility and equally inexhaustible imagination. McCay already drew the perfect Little Nemo. Why does anyone else need to bother?

Barlow suggests that others are bothering, or are able to bother, because McCay’s work is out of copyright. Public domain has left McCay’s corpus defenseless before the onslaught of rabid artistic poachers.

It’s certainly true that an independent publication on the scale of Dream Another Dream wouldn’t have been feasible for copyrighted work; you can’t just start a Mickey Mouse Kickstarter project without Disney’s say so and expect that to be okay. But just because a comic remains in copyright is hardly a guarantor that the original artistic vision will be left politely alone. Copyrighted characters are regularly reinterpreted across multiple media by artists who have little interest in, and often seemingly little knowledge of, the original creations. As just one example, the hunky salt-of-the-earth Kryptonian-battling Superman in Man of Steel doesn’t have a whole lot to do — visually, conceptually, or ideologically — with the quasi-socialist high-jumping basher of corrupt mine-owners that Siegel and Shuster invented way back there in the Great Depression. The forthcoming Dr. Strange movie will almost certainly abandon Steve Ditko’s visual style and Stan Lee’s overcarbonated prose for something blander and more conventional.

Being public domain doesn’t make Little Nemo uniquely vulnerable, then. On the contrary, being public domain seems to afford him some measure of protection. When you’re owned by a large conglomerate, there’s no telling what sort of sordid nonsense will happen to you under the auspices of “official” continuity — a villainous thug may turn into a dashing anti-hero, a warrior woman can be changed into an amnesiac sex doll. Why not, if it’s good for business?

Public domain, though, seems to at least potentially change the incentives. Nobody owns Nemo. He doesn’t belong to a corporation; he belongs to everyone. And since he belongs to them, the artists in this anthology treat him as if he’s in their care.

Not that all the cartoons here are necessarily reverent. Alexis Ziritt’s psychedelic Jack Kirby meets Day of the Dead space skull vomit is about as far as you could get from McCay’s preternaturally neat art nouveau style, while R. Sikoryak’s Freud/Little Nemo team-up introduces the kind of layered dream interpretation that McCay’s dazzling surfaces deliberately, and even ostentatiously, avoided. Even when artists in the volume deliberately subvert McCay, though, it’s McCay they’re deliberately subverting. It’s his original that they’re playing with, or riffing off of, or questioning. Sometimes it’s just an affectionate nod to his themes, as in Carla Speed McNeil’s adorable fantasy of a giant cat. Sometimes it’s a clever stylistic nod, as in Moritat’s use of imagery from Asian prints, neatly suggesting some of the sources (perhaps once or twice removed) for McCay’s own visuals.

And in many cases, it’s a tribute to the amazing way McCay put together a page. Paolo Rivera’s tour de force juxtaposition of the song “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” with a self-referential meta-adventure narrative, for example, seems only tangentially related to Little Nemo’s art; the visuals seem to owe as much to Hergé as McCay, and the verbal economy certainly isn’t inspired by McCay’s meandering repetitive prolixity. And yet, McCay’s hand is there, in the way that the page is seen so strongly as a spatial and temporal whole. McCay wouldn’t speed up time, or have his narrative loop back around, the way that Rivera does, but Rivera is able to do it because of the ideas, and the tool-kit, McCay gave him.

Admittedly, some piece in the book don’t gel. Peter Bagge’s wise-cracking, clunky cartooning style is a particularly poor fit for McCay’s elegant wonder; Dave Bullock and Josh O’Neill’s use of received fantasy adventure tropes seems like a waste next to McCay’s much less hidebound flights of fancy. But even the failures are talking to the original, not stealing from it, or ignoring it in the name of some larger cinema audience determined by focus group. We tend to see copyright as a way to protect intellectual property from abuse or misuse, but this tribute volume suggests that it may have the opposite effect. A dream isn’t meant to sit forlornly by itself in a bank vault with a bunch of lawyers; it’s meant to get out and inspire people. The more artists take from McCay, the bigger McCay gets. The more public Nemo becomes, the bigger the domain of his dream.

11 thoughts on “Dream a Dream of Public Domain

  1. Have you heard Alan Moore has a one shot coming out called “Big Nemo” which is announced as “a 1930s-set follow-up to Winsor McCay’s classic Little Nemo comics” Given the title, I suspect we’re in for some deconstruction, not reverential treatment.

  2. 1. Excellent points, Noah. Well done. Have you considered other means to accomplish similar ends — means that don’t negate the copyright? Nowadays, the big copyright owners often allow others to portray variations of their iconic properties (e.g., Squadron Supreme). Admittedly, a project like this goes even farther, but similar projects can be done in-house, as with Marvel’s recent revival of the Strange Tales anthologies or DC’s Just Imagine stories that featured Stan Lee’s take on DC’s major characters. That doesn’t address your point about the damage done to these characters through ignorance and greed, of course. But an exploration like this Nemo book is possible if the corporations are secure in the strength of the character and take their responsibilities as cultural custodians seriously.
    2. I got to meet Rivera at a convention this year. He seems to be a gentleman as well as an amazing artist.
    3. Thanks for once again highlighting Laura Hudson’s powerful article. I just read it again, and it was like reliving a twelve-step moment of clarity. She articulated so well what was wrong with the New 52, why I walked away from DC after decades, and what I try to avoid in work from other publishers.

  3. I hadn’t heard of that, Pallas. I’ll be interested to see it.

    John, in the U.S., parody is protected speech. I suspect Supreme would qualify as parody, so I suspect that’s why it didn’t face legal action.

  4. Maybe — and Supreme is one of the examples I thought of — but the example I gave was Marvel’s Squadron Supreme. Squadron reinterpreted all the traditional characters of the Justice League. There was even a series wherein the Squadron sets up an authoritarian government in a misguided, but well-intended response to a crisis. I don’t know the legal definition of parody, but it was quite serious in tone. Furthermore, there are a host of characters from Astro City or America’s Best Comics or other imprints that are closer to their inspirations than the original Captain Marvel was to Superman. I don’t know if these characters are possible because they’re immune to legal challenge, or if the copyright owners have realized there needs to be some room for out of continuity discussion of these characters and what they represent.

  5. I’ve just done a tiny bit more research on this. I recommend the legal section of the Wikipedia entry on the guerrilla film Escape from Tomorrow as well as the entry on “fair use,” which covers parody and a whole lot more. The law appears to be more reasonable than I expected.

  6. Gerhard, man…you’d think all that ocd hatching wouldn’t mesh well with McCay’s clean, flat surfaces but, wow. Hard to think of anyone else in anglophone comics who has a similarly McCavian (?) taste for Piranesian vistas.

  7. I pine for an alternate universe where the Copyright Act of 1909 was never revised in the late 1970s by Rep. Sonny Bono and other pro-Disney cronies, and where any works published before 1958 would currently be public domain.

  8. Some of the revisions in the 1976 act were positive. Everyone’s better off with the indivisibility rule gone. It was also good that, with new material, there would no longer be a work-for-hire presumption if it was commissioned. But I certainly agree the term extensions in the ’76 and ’98 acts have been ridiculous.

    One little correction: I don’t think Bono had any input into the ’76 law. His contributions were to the ’98 one.

  9. Huh…I guess I’m not convinced that he’s got a whole lot to do with the original. Working a few blue collar jobs seems different than actually fighting on behalf of unions and against corrupt bosses.

    The praise for Kevin Costner is I guess what I really disagree with. I pretty much want to vomit whenever I see him on screen at this point.

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