Winsor McCay is, of course, a legend in both comics and animation. And reading his comics, you can see how fascinating he found movement and timing. The spatial relationships between panels often comes into play, whether it's utilizing the horizontal movement of a parade, the vertical movement of Nemo falling, or putting one big circle in the middle of the page and having the panels move around it. In one comic, McCay's interest in animation was especially apparent as Nemo was being swung around by a trapeze artist, each panel functioning very much like a frame in animation.
What I personally found most appealing about the comic were the settings and situations. Very dreamlike; they seemed more like a way for McCay to explore several interesting ideas quickly than an actual story, like we're seeing part of his thought process. And of course, there's the classic ending of Nemo waking up at the end of each comic, often falling out of his bed. I laughed every time...
On the other hand, there's a dark side to Little Nemo's adventures. Many of the people he meets seem to meet bad ends, like the glass people and their queen Crystalette who all break into a million pieces when Nemo attempts to sneak a kiss from the queen. The least you could say is that it's depressing, but this tiny child was just responsible for the deaths of a whole bunch of people. Maybe they're not even real, since these adventures of "Slumberland" are so obviously a dream world, but still: those are some dark imaginings for a kid his age.
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