While reading Little Nemo, I noticed at the beginning of the serialization, each panel was accompanied by a numbered description that explained the context. Inside the panels, the characters interacted with each other, with balloons outlining speech, in pretty surreal settings and strange situations. Not unlike a dream sequence. Which is kind of the gist for Nemo stories.
Each chapter is a dream sequence in which Nemo is about to enter Slumberland, or is in it, but something stops him. He wakes up by the Sun that melts the gorgeous dream away.
I feel like it's trying to say the inevitable mornings and events he cannot control stop him from enjoying a better world. It's pretty sad, in a way. The chapters that follow that same formula: Dream sequence. Nemo wakes up. He's miserable.
Not always it occurs when he's sleeping, however. Nemo has quite the imagination, and seems to enact the fantastic odysseys in real life. For example:
I suppose the stories of Nemo are both hopeful and depressing realities of growing out of innocence.
George Herriman's Krazy Kat, on the other hand, is a slightly more disheveled comic. For the time, the layout wasn't as important to consider, so being critical on this aspect is unfair, however, I feel like Little Nemo had a clearer layout, having been published a decade earlire than Krazy Kat.
What this tells me is that Krazy Kat has a looser style; it's representative and iconic, based more on the figures telling the story than an actual narration (Little Nemo), with complementary dialogue between characters. The gist of the story is there is a cat that does reckless things, then the police catches him.
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