Flip is the willful id to Nemo's hapless ego, a wild-haired kid with a half-green face, gaudy clothes, an enormous cigar and a huge yellow top hat that reads "WAKE UP"; his goal is to reach the princess and, uh, become her playmate before Nemo does. About that cigar, by the way: Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" was not translated into English until 1913, and there's almost never a sense that Nemo's dreams symbolize anything in particular.

After Nemo and the princess are finally united in July 1906 -- just as the dawn breaks, and fades McCay's black lines to blue -- "Little Nemo" subordinates its storytelling to its design for a few months. It becomes a World's Fair sort of affair, with the couple encountering immense animals and thrill rides. Then "So Many Splendid Sundays!" jumps ahead a year, by which point the princess has disappeared. Nemo and Flip have become two-thirds of an exploring team with the Jungle Imp, a caricature left over from an earlier McCay series who's rather hard to bear. (He's prone to dialogue like "ih ip ig ung gig gumple.")

By this point, McCay's obviously coming up with impressive-looking things to draw and constructing Nemo's dreams around them. He was particularly fond of architecture; one monthlong sequence finds the trio somehow transformed into giants, romping around a painstakingly detailed if not exactly accurate landscape of Lower Manhattan buildings, and destroying most of them in the process. Seeing these pages at tabloid size, once again, they make more sense than they have in a century: The buildings are drawn at the scale a child would see them, looking out the window of a Herald subscriber's Manhattan high-rise apartment.

A few months later, Nemo, Flip and Imp start exploring the inside of an enormous palace, Befuddle Hall, in a segment that goes on for months. An architectural walk-through wouldn't normally be the stuff of grand entertainment, but McCay is drawing with astounding vigor and glee. There's a stairway that seems to rise to the moon and another that descends unimaginably deep, a hall of mirrors that reflects the trio into an infinite, kaleidoscopic legion and another that distorts them into fun-house smears as tall as the page. Finally, there are grand ballrooms drawn upside down and sideways; Nemo and his friends, wearing policemen's uniforms (because why not?), scurry for footholds on the moldings.

"Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!"

By Winsor McCay

Sunday Press Books

Cartoon classics

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Curiously, in the later strips reprinted in "So Many Splendid Sundays!," "Nemo's" plot starts to overtake its design again, and sometimes to overwhelm it. In the spring of 1910, Nemo and friends -- drawn more quickly and with less detail than before -- hop aboard an airship and head off to Mars, where a businessman named B. Gosh has a monopoly on all the essentials, including air and words. There are still plenty of lovely Art Nouveau-inspired images, like a field of immense roses bounded by Greek columns and stretching off to the horizon, but the "airship" sequence doesn't often have the early strips' bracing sense of spectacle, and -- more important -- by 1910, "Nemo" no longer seems like the stuff of actual dreams.

That was the joy of "Little Nemo" at its best, the thing that set it apart from McCay's other strips like "Little Sammy Sneeze" and "A Pilgrim's Progress," and even "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend": It didn't just evoke its readers' dreams, it seeped into them. Nemo is too small to act, really, and he doesn't understand the real world yet, let alone the subconscious world in which his desires and fears are made strangely real, and which he leaves by falling or drowning or being shaken into wakefulness by unfamiliar voices that become familiar as he opens his eyes. But McCay also realized that the dream world is a richly aestheticized one -- streamlined in its motives, stripped down to the things the conscious mind cares about most, and amplified into impossibility. Like very few other artists, he managed to turn that aesthetic into something that doesn't fade when Flip calls the Dawn Family to turn night into day.

Douglas Wolk's graphic novels column appears at the beginning of each month in Salon books.

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