1. Walt Disney The most mentioned devotee of Winsor McCay, Walt Disney was both successor and disciple. Born more than 30 years after McCay, Disney would become the first animator to succeed in re-creating the quality of art and storytelling that McCay had shown to be possible two decades prior. Walt's first cartoon? Alice in Slumberland. It may also have been McCay who sold Walt on cel animation rather than other available techniques. More on that later.

2. Chuck Jones and Walter Lantz The creators of Woody Woodpecker and Bugs Bunny also attributed McCay as their inspiration for getting into animation. When he was 15, the first cartoon Lantz ever saw was McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur. It was Jones who said "The two most important people in animation are Winsor McCay and Walt Disney, and I'm not sure which should go first."

3. Neil Gaiman Winsor McCay casts just as long a shadow over the world of comic books as he does over animation. After all, he invented comics. There were no continuing comic stories before McCay, no protagonists — only single-frame political cartoons. In his opus The Sandman, Gaiman pays tribute to McCay's Nemo, albeit through his own trademark dark lens.

4. Alan Moore Moore has actually referenced McCay more than once in his work. He conceptualized the above comic-within-a-comic Little Margie in Misty Magic Land that then appeared in his own Promethea series. Another Little Nemo reference by Moore can be found in the dystopic Miracleman series (issue #4), when Miracleman et al arrive in a place called "Sleepy Town".

5. Bill Watterson Calvin, Hobbes and Bill Watterson himself are all my heroes. The same might be said for Watterson with regard to Winsor McCay and Nemo. It is in Watterson's work that the closest modern approximation to the comics of McCay can be found. Calvin lives in a similar imagined world to Nemo. Watterson's wonderful use of perspective and marvelously loose relationship with panels were pioneered by McCay. Even McCay's famed irony and philosophy are brilliantly echoed in Watterson's work.

6. Maurice Sendack The creator of Where the Wild Things Are was also a disciple of McCay. Each of Sendack’schildren's books in some way seem to pay tribute to Nemo, but in none is the parallel more obvious than in In the Night Kitchen. This image from that book shows a dreaming child returning to his bed much as Nemo did at the end of each of his adventures. The only detail missing is the child tumbling out of bed afterward, a thing which Nemo did with amazing regularity.

7. Victor Herbert Little Nemo's retellings are not limited to picture books and cartoons, not by a long shot. Victor Herbert had already created his big hit Babes in Toyland when Winsor McCay began writing Little Nemo. After such great success in creating a musical based upon children's fantasies, I doubt there was much chance of Herbert not adapting Little Nemo. He did so in 1908, only three years into the comic's run. It is one of the few retellings which McCay would be able to enjoy in his own lifetime.

8. Genesis If you haven't heard of Genesis, you have at least heard of their lead singer and drummer, Phil Collins. When recording their 1978 Album …And Then There Were Three… the group had recently undergone a bit of a changing of the guard. Maybe it was because of this shakeup that their ninth studio album also featured the very first Genesis song with lyrics written solely by Collins. The song was entitled "Scenes from a Night's Dream" and was a tribute to Little Nemo.

9. Film Admittedly worse than the music video for Scenes from a Night's Dream,
Hollywood
did take a crack at the world of Nemo. Entitled Nemo (Dream One) the film was released in 1984 and quickly rocketed to no success. This may have been in part due to producer John Boorman's stripping away the Nemo story and replacing it with a jealous romance. He then threw any and all literary characters he could think of into the film and called it a day. I move we do the same.

10. Anime At this point I think it goes without saying that cartoons as we know it owe their existence to Winsor McCay. As a subset of cartoons, anime is no different. In their own retelling of the Little Nemo story, titled Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, Japanese animators brought in talented Americans to be part of their team. The script was written by Chris Columbus (director of Harry Potter 1 & 2) and Richard Outten and the Sherman Brothers (of Mary Poppins fame) wrote the soundtrack.

11. Nintendo A year after the anime came out, that other giant of Japanese industry, Nintendo jumped on the Nemo remake bandwagon. Little Nemo: The Dream Master came out for the original NES in 1990, just one year before the SNES system hit North America. In this version Nemo was tasked with freeing Morpheus, the king of dreamland, from imprisonment. Not only Nemo's iconic bed, but the surrealist dreamscapes and ornate airships of McCay's art make appearances in the game. Nemo even reawakens after each level.

12. Steampunk Speaking of airships, the group of people (myself included) who fantasize about riding around in them owe a lot to Winsor McCay. Later in his career, McCay was hired exclusively by William Randolph Hearst. Hearst forbade McCay to work on anything but editorial cartoons for the newspaper. To many this spelled the stifled doom of McCay's career, but McCay found ways of expanding even the limited realm of editorial cartoons. Ornate airships and fantastical cities arose from the otherwise hum-drum pages of the New York American.

14. World War I The involvement of the U.S. in WWI is largely attributed to the sinking of the Lusitania and the death of 123 Americans who were on board, a Rockefeller among them. The most effective way the news of this event was brought to the citizenry was in a cartoon McCay made, named simply The Sinking of the Lusitania. The 1918 film, shown all across America, was striking for the time and employed McCay's first use of cel animation. It was about this time that a young Walt Disney decided to pursue careers first in political cartoons and then in cel animation.

16. The Sarasota Opera If none of the above options seemed like they could have affected you in any way, don't fret just yet. There's still time to experience a brand new version of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland. On November 10 in Sarasota, FL a new Nemo opera premieres. Though it does seems to introduce new characters, a whole host of McCay's creations are sure to appear upon the stage. And so McCay's story is told once more, introducing a new generation of fans to the man who started it all.

15. Who Framed Roger Rabbit The idea that living people could interact with cartoon characters stems directly from the very first cartoon to have a discernible "character," Gertie the Dinosaur. Winsor McCay drew the cartoon dinosaur and imbued her with a defiant, childlike spirit. He then toured around with the cartoon, giving Gertie directions and scolding her when she misbehaved. At the end of the cartoon, he would leave the stage and enter the cartoon, riding away in Gertie's open mouth. In the only cartoon to feature Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons together, this concept is set as the core of the film.

13. Dystopian Futurism Another concept McCay explored while at the New York American was that of a future gone wrong. 15 years before Aldous Huxley penned Brave New World, Winsor McCay was warning the world about "technocracy" and cities crushing themselves to death. In a cartoon concerning isolationism, American businessmen can be seen marching to oblivion rather than into a prosperous tomorrow. In another, a giant hand threatens to drown a young woman under the waters of social conditions.