A Journey Due North

The man in a nightshirt who dreams he is falling and wakes up safe in his bed  is one of those comic memes (along with wives waiting at the top of the stairs with rolling pins for drunken husbands) at least as old as the Joe Miller Jest Books. This January 26 1870 Judy gem (with very Eisner-ish type lettering against a foggy background) is unsigned but bears the sigil of a fox. This comic is not as startling as the Victorian Little Nemo pages of George du Maurier, but is one of many single and multiple panel cartoons which plucked the idea from the smoke-filled factory air of the nineteenth century.