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Very few people who are still alive have seen Winsor McCay's work the way it was meant to be seen. That's a shame -- he was one of America's first major comic-strip artists, and a century after his peak, his work is still startling. History-minded cartoonists from Art Spiegelman to Vittorio Giardino have composed dozens of homages to McCay; he's easy to pastiche or parody, because his best strips follow the same formula in every episode. Someone falls asleep and has a turbulent, fantastical dream, full of strange exclamations, then wakes up in the last panel, complaining about having eaten something before going to sleep. In "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend," which ran for almost 10 years in the early part of the 20th century, the food in question was specifically Welsh rarebit. (Alan Moore zinged McCay with a sleep-talker's monologue in his 1986 story "Pictopia": "Melted cheese! Melted cheese! Oh, mama, do take care, my sheets will tangle for sure!") As for McCay's work itself, it's been reprinted here and there, although virtually all of it is out of print, except for the odd page or two that inevitably shows up in history-of-comics retrospectives.
But he didn't draw his comic strips to be treated as museum pieces; he drew them to make newspaper readers' eyes bug out of their heads. "Little Nemo in Slumberland" was the peak of McCay's art, and "Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!," edited by Peter Maresca, is the first book to do justice to it, basically because it is freaking gigantic. It's a luxury item -- 120 bucks -- but it delivers: at 16 by 21 inches, it's a coffee-table book bigger than some coffee tables. In other words, it's the size of the New York Herald's tabloid pages, on which "Little Nemo" was originally printed, and its gorgeous color reproduction is designed to look like the pages as they were published, on paper far nicer than newsprint but with the same background tone.
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