Dave in Slumberland
May 31, 2009 ~ 8 Comments
Yup, time for another New Year’s Slumberland strip. Most of the Slumberland strips are pastiches of multiple Little Nemo strips, but this one is copied directly from the New Year’s 1906 Little Nemo in Slumberland. I’m especially proud of Mell as the New Year and Old Year at the top, which gave me an opportunity to draw that kiddie version of Mell I was fond of drawing around this time.
Each of the Slumberland strips foreshadows events in the coming year of Narbonic. This one is entirely about the time-travel storyline, “Dave Davenport has Come Unstuck in Time.” “Professor Madblood and the Doppelganger Gambit” went on for so long that, for a while, I worried I wouldn’t get to “Unstuck in Time” within 2003 and the impact of this strip would be ruined. Fortunately, I managed to wrap up “Doppelganger Gambit” by the end of July, allowing me to devote the second half of the year to “Unstuck in Time.”
“I am just barely ahead” is a terrible, terrible pun. I’m not at all sorry.
“Oh dear! It is the princess come to get me!” is a line that should appear in more fiction.
It’s been three years since I last read this episode. That pun still stings as fresh as it ever was.
All that I would change in this episode is to give Old Year Mell white hair. I have every assurance that she would remain recognisable.
Last year I posted a quote from antiquity that happened to compare madness and foretelling the future. Here’s one for this year: quos deus vult perdere, dementat prius – I recall it means “Those whom the gods will destroy, they first make mad.” It’s the sort of quote you might put on the inside cover of Narbonic Volume 6 if you were suffering delusions of grandeur.
Nice quote, but personally I prefer the Hogwarts’ School of Wizardry and Witchcraft motto: Numquam tittilandus draco dormiens. (“Never tickle a sleeping dragon.”) Simple, yet profound… unless you’re flameproof.
Hooray! I love Dave in Slumberland…
(TUNE: “Auld Lang Syne”, Robert Burns)
Should dreams the princess come and get,
Foreshadowed things recalled?
In future days, I’m old and fat,
And have gone long since bald!
I’m old and fat and bald, oh dear!
I’m old and fat and bald!
In time unstuck, s*** out of luck,
And old and fat and bald!
@Leon: Your comment brings to mind one of my favorite Pratchett quotes, from Soul Music: “It is said that whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. In fact, whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company written on the side. It’s more interesting, and doesn’t take so long.”
This IS a particularly egregious pun. And yet, it would have gone right over the heads of people reading it for the first time. I can see you pondering if you should inflict this upon your readers, and then figure that the conclusion was a no-brainer.
Forget first-time, it flew over my head until just now, and this is my third read-through!
Oog. Yours is a bit jarring too.