In McCay, it was a combination of expansive imagination, multi-disciplinary eccentricity, and restless work ethic that set him apart. In 1905, after working on a handful of comic properties, he debuted what would become his signature strip, a sprawling full-page color adventure called “Little Nemo in Slumberland.” The series was an elegant fantasy in which the young title character, whose name means “no one,” is drawn from his bedroom into boisterous adventures in Slumberland, where walking beds, Godzilla-sized turkeys, and races through the stars were common fare.
Betsy Golden Kellem, at JSTOP Daily (“where news meets its scholarly match”), briefly examines the careers of Little Nemo and Winsor McCay in both their newspaper and animation phases.
Little Nemo is available to read and wonder at on the World Wide Web.
The Internet Archive has Little Nemo 1905-1914 by Winsor McCay.
The Comic Strip Library covers those same 1905 – 1914 years.
Which are fine as they are, but to really get the sense of a McCay Little Nemo page it needs to viewed as a whole (not scrolling up and down and back and forth). For that Sunday Press Books, famed for meticulous work, offers Little Nemo in Slumberland – So Many Splendid Sundays! and Many More Splendid Sundays!