"This volume includes a long run of his weekly strip ''Dream of the Rarebit Fiend,'' where he first visited the dreamscapes that would come to fill his celebrated ''Little Nemo in Slumberland.'' An illustrator's hands become grotesque cauliflowers; a woman's face grows gradually enormous; a census taker is forced to count all the flies in the world. The strips have none of the impossibly vast, morphing architecture of ''Nemo'' or its innovative paneling, and yet for their banality they feel all the more authentic, and they retain an uncanny freshness even as they approach the same punch line: the dreamer awakens and angrily blames the previous evening's Welsh rarebit for his dreams. Here McCay embraces, if not pioneers, one of the weirdest and unique pleasures of the serial comic: formula. It's the strange poetry of expectations fulfilled again and again, like Charlie Brown missing the football. Although, in McCay's case, the punch lines grow increasingly baroque: ''Oh dear!'' exclaims one dreamer among hundreds. ''Such is life in a big city. Welsh rarebits, huh? Fine dish. Not!!! Oof! I think I'll get up. I can't sleep. Nope! I'm done for. Oh! Oh!''
Does anyone here speak rarebit?”
Jonathan Hodgman, New York Times Book Review, July 18, 2004
