YMMV / Little Nemo

• Adaptation Displacement: Most people today know about Little Nemo because of the NES Game Little Nemo the Dream Master, which was based on the animated movie (not the other way around). You'll even be hard pressed to find anyone who has heard of the animated movie, and even fewer people know that the movie was based on a comic strip. So the comic strip of Little Nemo in Slumberland suffers from two degrees of adaptation displacement. Not to mention that whenever anyone talks about Little Nemo these days, people assume they mean that Pixar movie with the fish.
• Archive Panic: The strip ran weekly from 1905 to 1923. That's roughly 52 pages a year. Better start reading.
• Awesome Art: Winsor McCay, despite being self-taught, was an exceptional draftsman. The early 20th century newspaper layouts, which allowed for comics to take up full pages (as opposed to now, when they're made small enough to fit in as many ads as possible), meant that his drawings could be properly appreciated.
• Catharsis Factor: After watching Flip ruin many of Nemo's trips into Slumberland, using his uncle Dawn to melt Slumberland into nothing out of spite, and making the princess cry many times due to his antics, it feels very satisfying when Nemo has had enough of Flip's behavior and challenges him to a fistfight. Even more satisfying when Nemo actually punches Flip several times and knocks him down.
• Cult Classic: This applies to the film also, and by extension, the video game.
• Fair for Its Day: While the Imp characters do wear garb that today might be considered offensive, the characters themselves don’t sport any racist features that would’ve been seen at the time such as Blackface, and they are shown to be just as coherent as the main cast. Even the character of Impie is also treated as a main character and equal amongst the other characters, and the tribe is shown to have Bamboo Technology such as a car that has goats instead of wheels and a frog instead of a horn.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Nemo is quite popular in Japan which explains the animated movie and the video game based on it.
• Unfortunate Character Design: The Imps of Candy island, as well as Impie, were originally designed to look like island natives that simply sported the clown-like appearance given to many secondary characters in the comic. This resulted with characters that look more offensive than perhaps was originally intended.
• Values Dissonance:
  • In the comic, one strip has Nemo going around giving animals the ability to talk to humans. One male hippopotamus begs him not to let a female hippopotamus talk because "she'll talk to you deaf, dumb and blind about women's suffrage!" In 1910, the time of publication, this was a joke that could be taken a few ways; a hundred-plus years later, it'd just make the hippo (and the author) look like a jerk.
  • In one strip, a group of the Princess's very African-looking slaves show up to march in a parade in Slumberland.
  • The Abusive Parents issue. It was normal at the time. It is still normal in some places around the world, and considered the only way to be good parents. Ouch! ^note Literally!
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Calling the comic Nightmare Fuel aimed at kids is an understatement. It's a whole nightmare world! Though this is more of a shift in what is acceptable for children. It was a lot more open at that time as shown with other so-called children's books during that time like The Wind in the Willows, which would almost be impossible to publish as a kid's book now. There's even a panel where Little Nemo, who is about nine at that point, is reading Gulliver's Travels.

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