"I just couldn't stop drawing anything and everything," Winsor McCay was fond of saying. This compulsion was turned to good advantage by McCay, who was among the chief architects of both comic strip and animation art at the beginning of the twentieth century. Well-known illustrator of children's books Maurice Sendak, writing in the foreword to John Canemaker's Winsor McCay: His Life and Art, dubbed McCay "one of America's rare, great fantasists." McCay's comic strips Little Nemo in Slumberland and Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend were popular successes and artistic triumphs due to the fact that they featured a wealth of imaginative innovations in visual presentation and the quirky, dreamlike content that has become a hallmark of the best sequential art. Both strips deal with the dream state, and in their artwork and fantastic occurrences anticipate surrealism. M. Thomas Inge, writing in Dictionary of Literary Biography, noted that McCay's...