Vittorio Giardino’s erotic comic strip Little Ego is a playful parody and loving homage to Winsor McCay’s much-loved 1905 newspaper masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland. Just like the Little Nemo strips where a young boy travels through surreal, dreamlike fantasy landscapes only to wake up tangled in his bedsheets in the final panel, Little Ego follows the exact same structure.

Instead of a little boy exploring a whimsical wonderland, however, Little Ego is an attractive young woman in her mid-twenties who experiences creative, surreal, and sexually charged dreams. Her bizarre subconscious encounters range from interactions with sentient plants and animals to amorous entities.
While Little Nemo would wake up and talk to his mother, each Little Ego vignette concludes with Ego sitting up in bed, reflecting on the bizarre nature of her erotic dream and wondering how she will explain it to her psychoanalyst.

The strip first appeared in Glamour International Magazine in January 1984, then migrated to the Italian magazine Comic Art, where it was featured regularly between July 1985 and November 1989. As the series progressed, Giardino shifted from standalone, one-page vignettes to longer, multi-page storylines.

Following its immense popularity in Italy, the strips were translated into multiple languages and collected into graphic novels worldwide. In the United States it was published in English (the version shown here) by NBM Publishing under their adult imprint, Eurotica, and individual stories were featured in Heavy Metal magazine.