I hope and dream the time will come when serious artists will make marvelous pictures that will love and live in life-like manner and be far more interesting and wonderful than pictures you now see on canvas. I think if Michelangelo was alive today he would immediately see the wonders… The artist can make his scenes and characters live instead of stand still on canvas in art museums.

Winsor McCay, Cartoonist
WNAC Radio Broadcast, New York, September 1927

Winsor McCay's Little Nemo In Slumberland Volume 1 provides […] every known episode from October 13th 1905, the very first, until August 15th 1909. Never before published in complete collected form. In addition, another first: all forty-three episodes of McCay's first color Sunday feature, Tales of the Jungle Imps, as published in the Cinncinati Enquirer in 1903. Bonus promotional material includes playbills, posters, Little Nemo merchandise and more.

So thrilling is McCay's imagination to residents of the 21st century, we may forget what reactions such unbelievable contraptions, settings and stories may have caused among modernist early 20th century viewers. When Nemo began dreaming, Americans were still adjusting to the idea of a real flying machine, yet Nemo and his friends flew in everything from balloons and goose-drawn carriages to the backs of hawks and apparatus straight out of DaVinci's notebook. Also relatively new to readers of the era was Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and the idea that dreams were the only link to the true sub-conscious desires of humanity. Fantastical lands laced with satirical social commentary were the order of the day — Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Barrie's Peter Pan were already considered classics and the public was ready for another young hero.

Is Little Nemo In Slumberland a true barometer for pre-world war America? Staggering under low wages and poor working conditions of the industrial revolution, readers saw Nemo continually in danger from some sort of technology. True to the residual optimism of the day, Nemo always wakes before the threat of disaster is fulfilled. He is hopeful and questioning, often amazed and mostly mistrusting of technology that is new to him. Qualities that exemplify modernist society. Notice also the more unpleasant realities of the early American social structure: racial and ethnic prejudice, sexism, and class separation. Conversely, McCay himself needed Nemo as an emotional salve and clearly believed in a cartoonist's duty to entertain and cheer. Thus, after a great tragedy like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake or the stock market panic of 1907, Nemo and friends waited in the Sunday Herald to provide solace.

McCay once wrote, "I was never so happy as when I was drawing Little Nemo."