McCay's work has inspired cartoonists from Carl Barks to Art Spiegelman. Robert Crumb called McCay a "genius" and one of his favorite cartoonists. Art Spiegelman's 1974 "Real Dream" strip was partially inspired by "Rarebit Fiend", and his "In the Shadow of No Towers" in 2004 appropriated some of McCay's imagery, and included a page of "Little Nemo" in its appendix. Maurice Sendak's children's book "In the Night Kitchen" (1970) was an homage to McCay's work, as was Rick Veitch' comic book series "Roarin' Rick's Rarebit Fiends" (1994–96). Kim Deitch and Simon Deitch's graphic novel "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams" revolved around a character named Winsor Newton, based on an aged McCay. Cartoonist Berke Breathed lamented that the conditions of newspaper cartooning had devolved to such a degree since McCay's time that, had he worked later in the century, he would not have been allotted space sufficient for his expansive full-page fantasies.