THE BEST OF LITTLE NEMO IN...

It is difficult to imagine two illustrators as unlike in style and temperament as Winsor McCay and James Marshall. Though each of them was a consummate master at bringing a page of illustration to vibrant fictive life, their subject matter and results were worlds apart.

McCay, a cartoonist of awesome graphic virtuosity, was best known for the flamboyant full-page color comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” which he turned out for the Sunday New York Herald from 1905 to 1911 and, again, from 1924 to 1927. At the height of its popularity, in 1908, “Little Nemo” was appropriated by Broadway, becoming a hit musical with a score by Victor Herbert.

In contrast, James Marshall, who died in 1992 at the age of 50, was a contemporary master of the children’s picture book. His was a quietly successful and decidedly unflashy career. Its crowning achievement was a septet of disarmingly simple picture books about two irresistible buck-toothed hippopotamuses, George and Martha, whose near-unshakable friendship rivals that of Damon and Pythias.

Now, 70 years after the final “Little Nemo” strip graced the funny papers and 25 years after the first of James Marshall’s small-canvas tales, “George and Martha,” reached the eyes and ears of children, two generous anthologies--”The Best of Little Nemo in Slumberland” and “George and Martha: The Complete Stories of Two Best Friends”--appear almost simultaneously to offer us not so much a sampling as a full-course meal of the best work of two unique artists.

The medium of the color comic strip was scarcely a decade old when McCay’s “Little Nemo” burst onto the American scene. The artist had done an earlier strip, “Little Sammy Sneeze,” but it was no match, in either innovative techniques or surreal imaginative scope. In “Little Nemo,” McCay introduced panels that expanded or contracted--horizontally or vertically--as his artwork demanded. His pages gave an uncanny illusion of motion, of animation. The strip’s weekly installments never deviated from a single unchanging formula: A small boy, about 6, dreams a fantastic dream (more often than not crossing the border into nightmare) set in a rococo slumberland of mammoth architectural splendor and bizarre, unpredictable happenings. Just as the action in each episode builds to a crescendo of suspense, Little Nemo dependably (and reassuringly) awakens in his own little bed at home. Often an episode was completed in one strip; occasionally the dream extended over several weeks, even months. But there was always the same weekly ending: Nemo awakening, at home in bed, in the strip’s final panel.

The possessor of a wild and seemingly limitless visual imagination, McCay luckily had the graphic virtuosity to bring his slumberland fantasies to life before the viewer’s bedazzled eyes. In McCay’s imagined world, a volcano may erupt inexplicably from the page; floors can open and characters disappear before our eyes; the columns of a large hall may be transformed into giant tree trunks with monsters lurking behind each one. Without warning, Nemo and his two sidekicks, Flip and the Imp, will suddenly grow to giant size or shrink helplessly. In one magical strip, Nemo and Flip are ice skating on a shiny surface that gradually reveals itself to be Nemo’s grandfather’s bald pate! There’s never a dull moment.

With such unremitting graphic high jinks to beguile us, plot, dialogue and characterization are almost beside the point. McCay’s protagonists are little more than cardboard foils for the artist’s incredible flights of fancy.

In sharp contrast to McCay’s busy and ingeniously complex dream world, Marshall creates a familiar, but entirely uncluttered, real world: a minimalist’s paradise for two undeniably real hippopotamuses, George and Martha. Each of the seven picture books, united here for the first time, contains five vignettes about George and Martha’s enviable relationship.

These mini-stories vary in length between four and 10 pages. Their brief texts are unfailingly on a left-hand page, smack in the center of a comforting sea of white. The droll illustrations, black-ink line with watercolor washes, are always on the right, each measuring 7 inches square and enclosed in a black-outline frame surrounded by a generous border of white page. Every vignette is separated from the one that follows by a blank white page, a kind of curtain between acts, a respite to digest what we’ve seen and heard.

If, at first glance, this all seems too simple-minded, something a talented child might toss off on a good day, forget it. Marshall has purposefully constructed this wondrously welcoming, entirely reliable world of words and pictures in perfect synchronization. His childlike drawings effectively erase any barrier between grown-up artist and young audience.

A serious student of the picture book genre, Marshall greatly admired the simplicity and sotto voce wit of both Jean de Brunhoff and Tomi Ungerer. He did his mentors proud: George and Martha are captivating. From the very first vignette (1972), in which George pours his bowl of split pea soup into his loafer (to keep from hurting the feelings of Martha who “was very fond of making split pea soup”) to the 35th and final episode (1988), in which Martha doesn’t let undying friendship stand in the way of an antic act of revenge on George, the reader/viewer painlessly absorbs nourishing kernels of truth about friendship. In George and Martha’s world, friends don’t lie to one another; they try to make each other feel good in moments of crisis or pain; they forgive and forget; and they never say I told you so. The words and pictures are so happily wedded that the two are, in fact, inseparable.

We grow so accustomed to George’s and Martha’a peccadilloes that we forgive George his macho boasting (“I used to be a wicked pirate”) and Martha her occasional know-it-all bossiness. They become our friends, and so our laughter is affectionate when Martha does her “Dance of the Happy Butterfly” or comes bouncing down the lane on a pogo stick. And we do not sneer when poor George is too afraid to jump from the high-diving board and must beat a cumbersome retreat. Like us, they have their failings: George has the bad habit of spying on Martha, and Martha can be vain and a trifle heedless (“How I love to look at myself in the mirror”).

Because the artist’s pictures are so unencumbered and plain, every graphic detail counts. At the end of the first book, George loses one of his two front teeth in a skating accident. The dentist replaces it with a gold one that is, ever after, George’s identifying feature. From the second book on, Martha always wears a jaunty red tulip bud behind her left ear. If she is feeling ill, it droops in sympathy. Each rereading of the tales is guaranteed to reveal more treasures.

Marshall’s attention to both pictorial and narrative details is punctilious. When the hippos ride the “bump” cars at an amusement park, George’s fedora pops straight off his head, the only indication of a collision with Martha’s vehicle. Under George’s sink is a detergent called Ker Pow, and the title of a scary movie the friends attend is “The Mummy’s Toe.” George’s dentist is named Buck McTooth. Children are particularly appreciative of such unexpected bonuses, and adults take pleasure in pointing them out.

Certainly no two illustrators could author a more dramatic contrast. To McCay, a blank page afforded the challenge to dream an impossible dream and capture it in gloriously theatrical images and detail. To Marshall, the same page cautioned disciplined restraint; his motto as an artist may well have been “less is more.” The work in neither of these anthologies has been tarnished by the passage of time, and both are of interest to children and adults. In the case of the Marshall anthology, the amalgamation of all seven “George and Martha” books between sunny yellow covers somehow strengthens the hippos’ charms. “Little Nemo,” on the other hand, like any rich confection, is best taken in measured helpings. Each of these collected works deserves a wide audience.