As Winsor McCay was one of the pioneers of the comic strip, his experimentation with metacomics helped to establish the role of sequential art in the broader art world and shape its role as a medium for our imaginations. His most famous strip, Little Nemo, deals with the active imagination and subconscious desires of a young boy named Nemo and manages to convey the world artistically as a child could perceive it. Specifically, McCay's dream metacomics present a child striving for empowerment among a world of adults and defining himself through the artwork that represents his fantasy and reality.

    The metacomics in Little Nemo are centered around an inherent struggle for power between forces of apparent and intrinsic authority. On a basic narrative level, the entity in control of Slumberland is King Morpheus, who is a mostly absent figure. The king's majesty and influence are emphasized in a poster requesting Nemo's capture, with an exaggerated reward of valuable jewelry and “$960,000,000,000.” However, despite Morpheus's intense desire to control Nemo, and Nemo's helplessness in the sense that he is only a child, Nemo is always able to elude authority. We see a direct example of this sedition in a scenario in which the king expresses his agency by closing the Banquet Hall, but Nemo and his allies assert their autonomy by “creating” sustenance out of the page's lettering. Rather than perceiving this as an act of rebellion against the king, though, Flip complains, “Why don't the artist feed us then!” The page's conflict develops rapidly through the panels: in the first panel, we see the characters oppressed by King Morpheus; in the second panel they start dismantling the artist's line and Nemo is fearful of retribution; then, in the fifth panel, Nemo is able to justify his vandalism by arguing that the artist “ought not to starve us this way!” By simultaneously resisting the king's denial of food and assaulting the artist's drawing, Nemo is manifesting his desire for self-empowerment; however, this fantasy scenario is contrasted with reality in the last panel when Nemo is reprimanded by his father, reasserting the acceptable social dynamic in which adults are in charge and children are subservient. It is through these important (albeit small) last panels that Nemo's intellectual freedom is kept in check and an attempt is made to comfort the readers with the knowledge that no matter how independent and irreverent Nemo and the others are in the dream world, the rules of the real world ultimately still apply.

     The roles of the apparently oppressive antagonists in Little Nemo, King Morpheus and “the artist,” become diminished when the narrative is viewed in the context of the dreamscape. The comic is presented to us, as readers, both as a construct (as illustrations by McCay) and as a fantasy narrative (as in the plots, characters, and locations of Slumberland), but another level that the comic is presented in is as Nemo's subconscious. This dreamworld, then, operates on its own two levels. The lower level is that in which the dream is insubstantial in a narrative function: all of the drama, conflict, and danger is resolved abruptly by Nemo's predictable awakening, the setting and circumstances completely change from page to page, and the dreams are notably detached from reality in the sense that they are merely a fictional world inside the mind of a fictional character who is even insignificant within the context of his limited reality (Nemo is merely an annoyance to his parents). The upper level, though, is closer to a reality-based narrative, in which there are consistent characters (principally Flip) and/or story arcs that persist through multiple pages (dream sessions). This distinction is relevant because it is only in these “realistic” upper level dreams that the metacomics occur, suggesting a degree of self-control and awareness associated with consciousness. It is by this greater awareness that Nemo's desire for self-empowerment is heightened. However, a significant problem with this desire is that, within his dreams, Nemo is already completely self-empowered in the sense that all of the characters, places, events, and emotions in the dreams are really just products of his own subconscious. Nemo solves this problem by externalizing this ideal, godlike self-image as “the artist.” This division is exemplified where Nemo, encapsulated in a tangled panel border, exclaims, “Look what the artist has done to me oh!” What Nemo is really saying is, “Look what I have done to myself oh!”, but it is easier and more satisfying for Nemo to blame someone else for his suffering. There is one exception to this dynamic, though, which is when Nemo dreams of being a Jesus-like figure. This scene suggests that Nemo is capable of unifying his dream-identity, but that he is only able to do so on rare occasions. Generally, this separation of the self is a necessary tool employed by Nemo in order to cope with his hostile dream realities.

    When Nemo blames “the artist” for his problems in his dreams (for “the artist” is never given credit for good things), he is relating the act of illustrating to dreaming. Indeed, in a page where Nemo acknowledges that his dream is a series of sequential images, McCay uses Nemo's attitude about this dream to make a statement about dreams in general. Nemo mentions twice that the artist “forgot” to draw the panels' floors, as if this detail was random and accidental. It appears as well that Nemo views the dream itself to be random and accidental, as he describes the events in the panels but does not venture to suggest that “the artist” is punishing him. However, we know that McCay deliberately drew the panels this way, and similarly we are able to deduce that Nemo's dreams have meaning and connections to each other and are not just coincidental occurrings. Another metacomic that relates art to dreams shows the strip gradually descend in visual complexity down to a child's level. This page conveys Nemo's association of power with adult conceptions, and in the first panel we see the strip rendered properly and Nemo in a dominant position: not only does he insult Flip in each of the first three panels, but he is also the one in the lead when he walks home with his group of companions. As the strip devolves aesthetically and becomes a child's artwork, Nemo ends up in the subjugated position between his mother and father and crying to show his feelings of weakness and helplessness. As I mentioned in the last paragraph how the child Nemo merges upwards with his adult “artist” persona in the Jesus page, in this page “the artist” merges down to the child's level. As a result of Nemo's persona becoming one entity instead of two, Nemo can not blame “the artist” like he does in the other metacomics. In a sense, the artwork in this page is an inverse of reality, as the drawings are more realistic when Nemo is with his dream friends and gets more cartoony the more Nemo interacts with his parents (who are always a significant part of the final waking panels). These methods of viewing comics as the medium of dreams allows artists like McCay to convey the visual and narrative structure of dream material.

    Through his Little Nemo pages, McCay attempts to visualize the psyche of a frustrated young boy trapped in a world of adults. Much the same way the characters sustain themselves by eating the ink from which they are born, the comic thrives on its adherence to fantastic and surreal scenarios that escape the tedium of reality. By use of the comics medium, we are able to experience Nemo's dreams in ways that relate to the visual and narrative style of our own dreams while allowing us the distance of a safe and fully-aware third-person position. These factors present a Slumberland that is far more real and relevant than the strip's claustrophobic reminders of reality at the end of each page could ever be.