Winsor McCay was one of America's greatest cartoonists, a master of both the comic strip and the animated cartoon. He didn't invent these forms, but while they were still in their infancy, he helped develop them into lasting popular art through his creative genius. A full-length biography of McCay has been long overdue: John Canemaker's handsomely illustrated and gracefully written book superbly fills the bill.
McCay was this country's first auteur animator. His masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland, is simply the most beautiful comic strip ever drawn, a surreal fantasy filled with lovely and often disturbing images, created in the sinuous, flowering lines of the highly decorative international Art Nouveau style popular at the turn of the century, and blocked with kinetic, near-cinematic narrative paneling.
Household World
In 1966, When McCay's work was featured in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nemo was singled out for high praise by the New York Times' art critic, John Canaday. Yet even today, the artist's name is far from a household world, except among cartoon aficionados and animation buffs. One ardent fan is the brilliant illustrator Maurice Sendak. In his foreword to Canemaker's book, Sendak writes: "My book In the Night Kitchen is, in part, an homage to Winsor McCay. He and I serve the same master, our child selves. We both draw, not on the literal memory of childhood, but on the emotional memory of its stress and urgency. And neither of us forgot our childhood dreams."
McCay passed a none-too-happy childhood in a small Michigan lumber town. The boy was obsessed by drawing. He sketched everything he saw, not just on paper--on fences, walls, and on the sides of barns. While still at school, he earned his first pocket money by doing portraits of the patrons of Wonderland, a Detroit dime museum and freak show. After several years of work as an illustrator for the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, his big-time break arrived in 1903 with an offer to join the staff of James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald. It was for Bennett's papers that McCay would create his greatest strips, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo.
Freudian and surreal, The Rarebit Fiend was also one of the wittiest comic strips ever invented. Its protagonist varied from strip to strip, but the narrative always involved a weird, oppressive nightmare provoked by overeating before bedtime--from which the dreamer always awakened in the last panel. The anecdote often entailed an oneiric metamorphosis: A teddy bear grows into a large beast that devours a baby; a man with the gout discovers that his toe has become larger than the rest of his body; to oblige her dentist, a woman widens her mouth and swallows him. McCay seemed obsessed by women's hats, for they often turn up in the strips as threatening objects--at times as large as flying saucers, these bonnets sometimes crash through city streets and flatten houses.
The fantasies portrayed in Little Nemo in Slumberland were at times even more delirious. With Nemo, McCay created a magical universe whose richness and imagination equal Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Frank Baum's Oz tales. Nemo was an immediate success. Its characters became instant favorites throughout the United States; within a year of its debut, it was being translated into seven foreign languages. In
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