Little Nemo (Sheet Music Cover)

This is not a comic strip but the cover of sheet music for the 1908 Broadway musical *Little Nemo*, adapted from Winsor McCay's celebrated Sunday newspaper page *Little Nemo in Slumberland* (New York Herald, from 1905). The illustration shows the boy Nemo, the elongated quack "Doctor Pill," a elaborately trained princess descending stairs, and a harlequin figure — stock characters from McCay's dream-logic strips. McCay's original pages pioneered fluid panel scaling, color as emotional atmosphere, and architecture-bending perspective that influenced every cartoonist who followed. The Broadway transfer confirms how quickly newspaper comics generated broader popular culture. McCay's Sunday pages, alongside Outcault's *Yellow Kid* and Dirks's *Katzenjammer Kids*, established the recurring-character strip as America's first truly mass visual narrative form.