It was a kind of Victorian soft porn. For over a century, The National Police Gazette was ubiquitous at men’s clubs, barber shops, saloons, general store backrooms. The Gazette was the 19th Century forerunner of modern men’s magazines, the supermarket tabloids of my generation, and the viral news memes of today. It was also part of the changing visual culture of the late 19th Century that seeded the ground for the flowering of newspaper cartooning to come.
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Between April 24 and Aug 23 1910 Winsor McCay sent Little Nemo and his wise-ass sidekick Flip to Mars, making for one of the longest and most politically pointed of the Little Nemo in Slumberland adventures. Mars was a dystopia of cement canyons and urban overgrowth, clots of faceless worker bodies rushing to thankless jobs. The landscape, with endless skyscrapers and spherical flying cars was as technologically wondrous as its lived reality seemed dismal. Mars is overtly Dante-esque. As the archway to the main city declares, “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Try to Enter Here Without the Price.” Unlike the classic Inferno, there is only one main sin driving the despair – greed. Even as the modern age of consumer capitalism was just taking shape, McCay satirized its logical extreme. Everything, from air to words, comes at a cost.
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