Fascinating early SF crossover
Aug. 30th, 2004 07:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkaySo, I've been reading a series of books reprinting Winsor McCay's early work. Best known for "Little Nemo in Slumberland", he was a massively influential cartoonist in the early days of the 20th century. Many of his strips feature dreams and/or surrealist imagery.
I read one 1907 strip today in which a man just missed a boat that he *had* to be on. A helpful person suggests that he catch up to the boat by having himself sent by wireless telegraph. He goes to the telegraph office ("messages to the left, sausages to the right"), where he is ground up into sausages; the sausages are sent over the wireless; the people at the receiving end then reassemble the sausages into the original person. He then proceeds to get into an argument over the transit fee :-)
Naturally, I noticed the similarity to the classic science fiction teleportation device. Imagine my surprise when I noticed, in small print at the bottom of the last panel, the words "thanks to Huck Gernsback"! A little googling showed that Hugo Gernsback, arguably the founder of SF as a distinct genre, did in fact adopt the nickname "Huck" in 1904. In 1907, he would have been 22 or 23 years old, and still at least a year away from founding his first magazine ("Modern Electrics"), and almost two decades before founding the first magazine devoted exclusively to SF ("Amazing Stories", in 1926). But clearly, even at such an early age, he was thinking about SFnal concepts. I wonder how he and McCay met?
EDIT: Quite possibly they didn't meet. About once a month, there was a "thanks to" line at the end of this strip, which leads me to suspect that readers frequently wrote in with suggestions.
I read one 1907 strip today in which a man just missed a boat that he *had* to be on. A helpful person suggests that he catch up to the boat by having himself sent by wireless telegraph. He goes to the telegraph office ("messages to the left, sausages to the right"), where he is ground up into sausages; the sausages are sent over the wireless; the people at the receiving end then reassemble the sausages into the original person. He then proceeds to get into an argument over the transit fee :-)
Naturally, I noticed the similarity to the classic science fiction teleportation device. Imagine my surprise when I noticed, in small print at the bottom of the last panel, the words "thanks to Huck Gernsback"! A little googling showed that Hugo Gernsback, arguably the founder of SF as a distinct genre, did in fact adopt the nickname "Huck" in 1904. In 1907, he would have been 22 or 23 years old, and still at least a year away from founding his first magazine ("Modern Electrics"), and almost two decades before founding the first magazine devoted exclusively to SF ("Amazing Stories", in 1926). But clearly, even at such an early age, he was thinking about SFnal concepts. I wonder how he and McCay met?
EDIT: Quite possibly they didn't meet. About once a month, there was a "thanks to" line at the end of this strip, which leads me to suspect that readers frequently wrote in with suggestions.
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Date: 2004-08-30 11:51 pm (UTC)I find it amazing how many comics Nemo shows up in. Gaiman used it; one of the Prometheas is clearly Nemo-esque; it's pretty cool. I grew up on it, as my dad bought me a big book of McKay when I was very, very tiny, so to me it was ubiquitous, the way Oz and Peter Pan are, but somehow mainstream culture has managed to forget Nemo.
Though I *did* find a reference to the Welsh Rarebit Fiend the other day...forget where that was, though...