Rare bits of history

Salon's Douglas Wolk has a great retrospective review up on the new compilation Little Nemo in Slumberland - So Many Splendid Sundays, a full-blown and gloriously formatted stockpile of Winsor McCay's landmark strips. Having first encountered Little Nemo in one of the greatest side-scroller NES cartridges of all time, I later watched him in the 1992 Euro-Anime-heyday-era Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (featuring the voice of Mickey Rooney as Flip!). I did, however, miss the Broadway production by a few years. It wasn't until college a fine man finally pointed me at these phenomenal old strips that were way ahead of the curve on several counts--premiering on Oct. 15, 1905. Yeah, you read that date correctly.

History-minded cartoonists from Art Spiegelman to Vittorio Giardino have composed dozens of homages to McCay...his best strips follow the same formula....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.

If there is another strip out there that deserves a 16'' x 21'' (yeah, you read those numbers correctly, too), glossy, slipcase "best of 1905-1910" treatment, I'd love to hear of it, because, as you'll read, this thing broke ground--lots of it.