Sunday Press Books has announced that will be offering Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland on the iPad. The series will be introduced with a free mini-book preview, Little Nemo in Christmasland.
Sunday Press owner Peter Maresca sees the iPad as a viable platform to display the giants of American comics. As former creative director for GoComics, Maresca was a pioneer in producing digital comics. “In the dark ages of 2004 it was frustrating trying to fit comic strips into a 2-inch screen, and for a strip like Little Nemo, with its huge panels and incredible detail, it was out of the question. With the large screen and multimedia capabilities of the iPad, it is now possible to appreciate the detailed beauty of this comic and the superb draftsmanship of Winsor McCay away from the printed page.”
Maresca plans to migrate the entire Sunday Press line to the iPad, with added material and a multimedia presentation.
Sunday Press will present its digital titles in three to four chapters per book priced at $3.99 each. All will include extra pages not found in the full-size books. A free “preview” edition will feature a dozen holiday pages from the ten years of McCay’s Little Nemo. All will be available through Apple’s App Store starting in mid-November.
Sunday Press Books first released the first collection of Little Nemo back in 2005 and received several awards including the Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman awards.
This is awesome. Too bad I don’t have an iPad. Any chance of an iPhone version….?
That takes me aback a little. Of all the comics done in the history of the world, I’d expect Little Nemo to be among the last that would “work” on an iPad. A big part of its beauty is McCay’s micro scritchy-scratchy detail, while another big part of its beauty is his macro page-scale composition. I don’t know how you simultaneously serve both on a screen that, while bigger than 2 inches, is still pretty small. Zooming in and out wouldn’t cut it for me.
However, I have so much respect for Peter and his approach to this material that I suspect I’m wrong and might have to rethink. I’m eager to see how it looks. List me as skeptical but keeping an open mind.
I’ve seen some vintage strips scanned and presented on an iPad, and they looked gorgeous. I was skeptical beforehand because of the smallish dimensions, but they really looked sharp and legible. Having said that, I still think print is a superior vehicle, but the iPad serves the material nicely.
Little Nemo’s best suited to large-scale high-quality prints, but it’ll probably find a bigger audience on the iPad as a $4 app than it would as a $50 book.
I’m all for Peter doing this. Preserving and presenting the classics of our artform is so, so important. Tom does such a great job with Hogan’s Alley.
It’s fantastic that new generations can be exposed to McCay’s genius.