Tag Archives: Winsor McCay

Dream a Dream of Public Domain

Posted on by

83a9b71fb4becb2def2a5fe1be240d33_large

 
This piece first ran on Splice Today
__________

“Now that most of Winsor’s work is public domain he can be imitated by lesser artists with a fraction of his skill and vision,” artist Fil Barlow quips in his contribution to the kickstarter-funded Winsor McCay tribute anthology Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream. The volume — paying homage to the famous newspaper comic in which Nemo falls asleep each night, dreams fantastical dreams, and then falls out of bed into waking in the last panel, —features an embarrassment of talent. Starting with Gerhard’s magnificent Escher-like frontispiece, the oversize volume, which ran a successful  kickstarter campaign, includes ravishing full page works by Craig Thompson, Bill Sienkiewicz, P. Craig Russell, Jill Thompson, Carla Speed McNeil, and just about everyone else you can think of in the world of comics.

And yet, despite the skill on display, Barlow’s snark still has bite. If there’s one person in the world of illustration who’s inimitable, that person would be Winsor McCay, with his walking beds and giant dragons and monstrous geese, his inexhaustible drawing facility and equally inexhaustible imagination. McCay already drew the perfect Little Nemo. Why does anyone else need to bother?

Barlow suggests that others are bothering, or are able to bother, because McCay’s work is out of copyright. Public domain has left McCay’s corpus defenseless before the onslaught of rabid artistic poachers.

It’s certainly true that an independent publication on the scale of Dream Another Dream wouldn’t have been feasible for copyrighted work; you can’t just start a Mickey Mouse Kickstarter project without Disney’s say so and expect that to be okay. But just because a comic remains in copyright is hardly a guarantor that the original artistic vision will be left politely alone. Copyrighted characters are regularly reinterpreted across multiple media by artists who have little interest in, and often seemingly little knowledge of, the original creations. As just one example, the hunky salt-of-the-earth Kryptonian-battling Superman in Man of Steel doesn’t have a whole lot to do — visually, conceptually, or ideologically — with the quasi-socialist high-jumping basher of corrupt mine-owners that Siegel and Shuster invented way back there in the Great Depression. The forthcoming Dr. Strange movie will almost certainly abandon Steve Ditko’s visual style and Stan Lee’s overcarbonated prose for something blander and more conventional.

Being public domain doesn’t make Little Nemo uniquely vulnerable, then. On the contrary, being public domain seems to afford him some measure of protection. When you’re owned by a large conglomerate, there’s no telling what sort of sordid nonsense will happen to you under the auspices of “official” continuity — a villainous thug may turn into a dashing anti-hero, a warrior woman can be changed into an amnesiac sex doll. Why not, if it’s good for business?

Public domain, though, seems to at least potentially change the incentives. Nobody owns Nemo. He doesn’t belong to a corporation; he belongs to everyone. And since he belongs to them, the artists in this anthology treat him as if he’s in their care.

Not that all the cartoons here are necessarily reverent. Alexis Ziritt’s psychedelic Jack Kirby meets Day of the Dead space skull vomit is about as far as you could get from McCay’s preternaturally neat art nouveau style, while R. Sikoryak’s Freud/Little Nemo team-up introduces the kind of layered dream interpretation that McCay’s dazzling surfaces deliberately, and even ostentatiously, avoided. Even when artists in the volume deliberately subvert McCay, though, it’s McCay they’re deliberately subverting. It’s his original that they’re playing with, or riffing off of, or questioning. Sometimes it’s just an affectionate nod to his themes, as in Carla Speed McNeil’s adorable fantasy of a giant cat. Sometimes it’s a clever stylistic nod, as in Moritat’s use of imagery from Asian prints, neatly suggesting some of the sources (perhaps once or twice removed) for McCay’s own visuals.

And in many cases, it’s a tribute to the amazing way McCay put together a page. Paolo Rivera’s tour de force juxtaposition of the song “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” with a self-referential meta-adventure narrative, for example, seems only tangentially related to Little Nemo’s art; the visuals seem to owe as much to Hergé as McCay, and the verbal economy certainly isn’t inspired by McCay’s meandering repetitive prolixity. And yet, McCay’s hand is there, in the way that the page is seen so strongly as a spatial and temporal whole. McCay wouldn’t speed up time, or have his narrative loop back around, the way that Rivera does, but Rivera is able to do it because of the ideas, and the tool-kit, McCay gave him.

Admittedly, some piece in the book don’t gel. Peter Bagge’s wise-cracking, clunky cartooning style is a particularly poor fit for McCay’s elegant wonder; Dave Bullock and Josh O’Neill’s use of received fantasy adventure tropes seems like a waste next to McCay’s much less hidebound flights of fancy. But even the failures are talking to the original, not stealing from it, or ignoring it in the name of some larger cinema audience determined by focus group. We tend to see copyright as a way to protect intellectual property from abuse or misuse, but this tribute volume suggests that it may have the opposite effect. A dream isn’t meant to sit forlornly by itself in a bank vault with a bunch of lawyers; it’s meant to get out and inspire people. The more artists take from McCay, the bigger McCay gets. The more public Nemo becomes, the bigger the domain of his dream.

#6: Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay

Posted on by

Winsor McCay spoke the saddest and greatest last words of any cartoonist. (Number two is Osamu Tezuka: “I’m begging you, let me work!”) McCay lived to draw; his greatest fear, he often said, was of losing that ability. On a July evening in 1934, the 65-year-old cartoonist called downstairs to his wife, “It’s gone, Mother! Gone, gone, gone!” He had just suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side. Shortly afterwards, he suffered a second stroke, from which he never recovered.

His first thought when the stroke paralyzed him, the last thought he was able to articulate, was that he had lost his drawing hand.

Many cartoonists, even many great cartoonists, find drawing a chore. But McCay loved to draw. He lived to draw. He built a side career as an animator so he could draw even more. Each Little Nemo strip overflows with more careful, lovely illustration than most of us could produce in a lifetime. McCay crowded his strips with duplicates, clones, and herds of identical figures; he couldn’t think of any pastime more fun than drawing sixty kangaroos or a hundred children in clown suits. Figures stretch and warp and bend; the panels themselves strain to accommodate the artist’s imagination, tipping over and reforming into weird new shapes.

This strip, of all strips, could never fill less than a full Sunday page. It’s wild and robust but strangely delicate, as if a strong breeze, or Mama calling from the kitchen, could dissipate McCay’s fine-lined, Art Nouveau fairyland.

This is what McCay loved so much, this Fabergé egg of a comic strip. He took pen in hand and sent readers tumbling into a shifting universe of princesses, dragons, elephants, hot-air balloons, ornate palaces, darkest wildernesses, walking beds, dreams that enter the waking world, and waking worlds that turn into dreams. At the end of each page Little Nemo wakes up and cries MAMA! And it’s gone.

Shaenon Garrity is an editor at Viz Media and the creator of the webcomic Narbonic. She writes about comics for comiXology, Otaku USA, and other publications.

NOTES

Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay received 25.5 votes.

The poll participants who included it in their top tens are: Eric Berlatsky, Noah Berlatsky, Jeffrey Chapman, Hillary Chute, Seymour Chwast, Brian Codagnone, Corey Creekmur, Kathleen Dunley, Joshua Dysart, Jackie Estrada, Shaenon Garrity, Geoff Grogan, Danny Hellman, Kenneth Huey, Jones, one of the Jones Boys, Abhay Khosla, Sean Kleefeld, Chris Mautner, Joshua Paddison, Marco Pelliteri, Hans Rickheit, Matt Seneca, Matteo Stefanelli, Joshua Ray Stephens, Matt Thorn, and Mack White.

Hillary Chute specifically voted for the newspaper comic strips of Winsor McCay, which was counted as a 0.5 vote towards Little Nemo in Slumberland’s total.

Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland was a newspaper strip that was first published on October 15, 1905. The original run continued until April 23, 1911. There were two revivals. The first of these ran from April 30 to July 26, 1914. The final run of the strip was published between 1924 and 1927.

The strip is in the public domain. As such, there have been many competing book collections put out by publishers. The best, least expensive introduction (as well as the collection that does the most justice to the original published page sizes) is Dover Publications’ Little Nemo in the Palace of Ice, which retails for $14.95. Click here to view it on Google Books.

–Robert Stanley Martin

Best Comics Poll Index

Strange Windows: Draw Buildings, Build Drawings (part 1)

Posted on by

 

Art by Nicolas de Crecy

Until January 2 2011, the official French museum of architecture — La Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine — is hosting an exhibition on comics and architecture, Archi et BD: La Ville Dessinée in the Palais de Chaillot, Paris.

The museum,  in the red square, as seen from the Eiffel Tower

The exhibition, curated by comics scholar Jean-Marc Thévenet and architect Francis Rambert, showcases over 360 items in a witty scenography by the Projectiles agency that evokes the nature of a comic strip– the visitor being its hero. The works are hung on rippling walls of translucid, backlit PVC.

I found this not altogether satisfactory, as the backlighting of original art tended to render it also translucent, hindering its readability.

Floorplan for the exhibition (click to enlarge)


The exhibition kicks off with Il était une fois Winsor McCay (Once upon a time, there was Winsor McCay). McCay (1869 – 1934) and his marvelous work, from the turn of the last century, is a fitting chronological start; few cartoonists indeed have matched his astounding architectural inventiveness:

Winsor McCay et ses héritiers (Winsor McCay and his heirs) highlights the work of such contemporaries of McCay as George McManus and Frederick Opper, all pioneers of the comic strip– which had very strong urban overtones from the start. No wonder: the explosive growth of the great American cities coincided with the appearance of the comic strip in a mass circulation urban press.

From McManus’ “Bringing Up Father”

New York, première icone (New York, the first icon) is the next subsection, and the array of depictions of the Jewel of the Hudson is dazzling.

Broadway’s lights, from the strip ‘Mary Perkins: On Stage’, by Leonard Starr

New York street scene by R.Crumb

Aside from the American cartoonists, it was a surprise to see how much New York had inspired European ones.

From Hermann’s “Bernard Prince à New York”

 

From “Bernard Prince à New-York”

From “Blacksad”, by Juanjo Guardino

Art by Janry. Note the racism of the caricatures– the interior is even worse!

 

Les Superhéros des mégapoles américaines (The superheroes of the American megalopolises) continues the theme, with art by Jack Kirby, Gene Colan and Will Eisner, among others.

`Daredevil`, by Gene Colan

The notes point out to the European visitor how varied and dramatic the p.o.v. shots are in superhero comics, the better to inject melodrama into the story — something, as an American, I was so used to that it took a European to underline how unusual this was in the broader context of world comics.

This sub-section is marred by the looped projection of a 1940s Fleischer Superman cartoon; its theme music blares continually down the gallery.

The next major section, L’esprit moderne (The modern spirit), starts out with l’Exposition Universelle de 1958 et l’Ecole belge (The 1958 World’s Fair and the Belgian School). The aforesaid World’s Fair took place in Brussels, and coincided with a post-war generation of young Belgian cartoonists such as André Franquin and Will: both showcased the new, futuristic modernism, as expressed in gadgets, vehicles– and buildings.

From ‘Tif et Tondu’, by Will

This style has since come to be called the ‘style Atome’, lovingly re-created by younger cartoonists such as the late Yves Chaland:

La Ligne Claire (The Clear Line) showcases major exponents of the eponymous school of comics drawing, with examples from heavyweights like Hergé (Tintin), but also such modern practitioners as Ted Benoit and Theo Van den Boogaard; it’s a style that, as architect Christian de Pontzamparc points out, is ideal for depicting buildings– and is partly inspired by architect and engineers’ concept drawings:

Van den Boogaard: “Léon la Terreur”

I confess that my affection for the ‘ligne claire’ comics is tempered by a distaste for their excessive cleanliness– like a Swiss housewife’s–, their blueprint-like precision, in a word their coldness: frigidity is one of the most insidious and damning sins of art. After the neat streets of Hergé one may long for the scuzzy Harlem of R.Crumb‘s sketches. This coldness, of course, is entirely appropriate for the sardonic irony of a Swarte, or the retro stylings of a Benoit.

Pontzamparc joined the most celebrated contemporary practitioner of the Clear Line style, the Dutch cartoonist and illustrator Joost Swarte, to design the Hergé Museum (which is represented at the exhibition by a model).

The Musée Hergé

Theater designed by by Joost Swarte

The third section is Itinerances de la bande dessinee (Wanderings of the comic strip). This heading is a bit of a catchall, covering the notion of travel both literally (as in Joe Sacco‘s trips to Palestine, or Loustal‘s Carnets de Voyage) and figuratively (Chris Ware‘s psychological explorations).

Village from Loustal’s `Carnets de Voyage`

Here, too, is a genuine weak spot of the exhibition– the relative paucity of strips from Japan, despite the claim that Tokyo is the new capital of comics.

Jiro Taniguchi‘s lovely Walker is presented, though:

I was charmed to discover examples of modern Chinese comics, such as those of Zou Jian-Le chronicling the transformation of Beijing:

This is also the section for Utopies (Utopias), the wild urban landscapes of fantasy and science fiction, such as those of Jack Kirby or of Jean-Claude Mézières:

New York in the future, by Meziere

New York in the 23d century, by Mézières

Another Mézières city view

A stunning space city by Mézières…if I show so much of this artist, it`s probably because he was once my cartooning teacher!

A futuristic city by Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud

This is also the domain of the future catastrophe, allowing strange visual depictions of current cityscapes, as in Nicolas de Crecy’s Période Glaciaire:

or in Jack Kirby‘s Kamandi:

Or consider the nightmare urban fantasias of Schuiten, as in his La Fièvre d’Urbicande:

Here, too, are exhibited some of the more “sci-fi-ish” projects of architects; always fascinating to see, though I am unconvinced of any links to comics:

Project by Yona Friedman, 1962

Undersea habitat project, Jacques Rougerie, 1973

Deepwater undersea lab by Rougerie, 1974

The final section, Regards Croisés (Crossed Viewpoints), is basically a mishmash of installations of various sorts and the nowadays-obligatory bank of computers for a set of boring interactive exercises.

Overall, a stunning experience. Here is surfeit for lovers of comics as well as of architecture; and matter for thought on the interaction of the two artforms, which we’ll explore in part 2.

—————————————————————————————————————

This is part 1 of a 3-part series. Click here for part 2 and part 3

Until January 2 2011, at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine (1 place du Trocadero, Paris). Tickets: 8 euros — a steal. The museum is also well worth visiting for its stunning permanent collections, particularly its many architectural models.
PDF of the press release (French and English)
The museum’s website

Eternal Appetite

Posted on by

This review originally ran in the Comics Journal.

Little Sammy Sneeze
Winsor McCay
Sunday Press

If you were a Freudian, you’d have to wonder when Winsor McCay was weaned. Indeed, his work is so obsessively and predictably orally fixated that you almost wonder if maybe he wasn’t. In each episode, his longest running strip, The Dream of the Rarebit Fiend featured a nightmare brought about by culinary overindulgence. And Little Sammy Sneeze stars a taciturn little boy with multi-colored neckerchiefs whose mouth yawns open to the size of his entire head before it emits an “ah-choo!” powerful enough to knock down small buildings.

Psychologically, an oral fixation indicates arrested development — an inability to take on adult responsibilities and characteristics. Whatever McCay’s own psychological profile, he certainly used the idea of oral obsessions to justify a world in which characters don’t, in fact, learn or change or, indeed, even exist in anything but the most notional way. In none of the strips in Peter Maresca’s new collection of all the Sunday Little Sammy Sneeze strips does the title character ever make an articulate noise. Instead, each strip follows the same pattern. In the first Sammy says “um,” with his mouth closed. In the second he says “Eee Aaa,” with his mouth slightly open. In the third he says, “Aah Aww,” with his mouth open wide. In the fourth he says “Kah” with his mouth gaping like some sort of bloated underwater fish. In the fifth he says “Chow,” and the force of his sneeze causes disaster and mayhem — either he hopelessly scatters the chits in a poker game, or startles the lions in a circus act, or sends Thanksgiving dinner flying into his grandfather’s beard. And in the sixth and last panel, he wears a blank expression as he is removed, often with a kick in the pants, from the scene of destruction.

The adults who surround Sammy are barely more sentient than he is. It’s true that they talk — but so repetitively that their words seem little more meaningful than Sammy’s grunts. In one paradigmatic sequence, two Italian immigrants speak in a nearly impenetrable patois, reiterating again and again how great America is and how “Da Italio man maka no troub he maka no troub for no one. Every ahbody say Italio man maka great excite in dese countries. I don see. I don see it.” The racism doesn’t extend to WASP characters, of course, but the aphasiac repetition does; if a McCay character says in the first panel that she’s afraid of falling on the ice, then you can be sure she’ll say the same thing in the second. And the third. And the fourth. Really, Sammy’s adults might as well be in a Peanuts TV special — “waah waah waah waah waah, waah waah waah waah waah.”

These strips are, in other words, little more than the same slapstick cliché, endlessly repeated. Next to this, even Beetle Bailey starts to look positively inventive. At least Mort Walker had three or four gags. No wonder that, in the introduction to the volume, Thierry Smolderen suggests, rather nervously, that McCay is putting us on, that it’s a “parody” which “chuckles at the absurdity of…doing the same thing ad nauseum.” McCay’s strip, you see, isn’t mindlessly repetitive; it’s making fun of mindless repetitiveness! Thank goodness! He’s a jaded intellectual, just like us!

McCay probably did enjoy doing the same thing over and over. Whether that enjoyment is adequately characterized by a distancing concept like “parody,” though, is another question entirely. Instead, the pleasure of McCay’s work seems more like that of a small child, who wants his parent to make that face again for the millionth time. It’s excessive and infantile, linked, not to a sense of irony, but a sense of wonder. As G. K. Chesterton says in Orthodoxy.

“children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough… It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again,” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again,” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

There is certainly something godlike about McCay’s artwork. Sammy Sneeze doesn’t try for the sumptuous fantasy of “Little Nemo”; still, the level of detail when McCay renders for example, a grocery store interior, is jaw-dropping. In the first panel, towers of individual cans and products are shown with a flawless clarity that makes the scene seem more real than life. It’s a tour-de-force in itself — and then McCay repeats it in the second panel, with everything the same except the positions of the customers. And then he repeats it again…and again…and then, with the explosive sneeze, throws everything into a chaos so crisply rendered it still somehow looks like order.

McCay is obviously one of a kind, but his particular take on cartooning is also a product of his era. The Little Sammy Sneeze panels, drawn in 1904-1905, look very much like cells for animation — and, of course, McCay would create his own animated shorts a few years later. Sammy also harks backwards to some of the early experiments in film, especially Edison’s 1894 Kinetoscope five-second film Fred Ott’s Sneeze, which, like the title says, shows one of Edison’s assistants, Fred Ott, taking snuff and sneezing. (A still from this film is reproduced in this volume’s introduction, though the caption erroneously identifies Fred Ott as “Ed Ott”.)

This collection generously allows us to see how McCay compared to some of his print peers as well. The book includes examples of two contemporary strips, The Woozlebeasts by John Prentiss Benson and The Upside-Downs by Gustave Verbeck. Visually, neither of these is much like Sammy Sneeze . In place of McCay’s vivid detail and art nouveau sense of still composition, Benson’s and Verbeck draw more on a tradition of cartoonish caricature. Benson’s drawings of fantastic beasts, in particular, hark back to Tenniel’s Alice illustrations. Verbeck is also influenced by children’s illustration. His drawings are deceptively simple; they look sketchy and rough…until you turn them over and realize that upside-down, they show a completely different picture.

Despite these differences, all three illustrators, do have something in common. Their visual orientation is essentially infantile, in the Freudian sense. They’re pre-Oedipal, the pleasures they offer have little, if anything to do with the symbolic system…which is to say, they don’t much care about narrative or character. In Sammy Sneeze the fun is in watching how each elegantly complicated panel differs from the last, and in the comforting repetition; in The Upside-Downs it’s in the ingeniousness of the illustration; in The Woozlebeasts it’s the delight of the nonsense creatures, who are described in fairly rudimentary limericks. The stories that are provided are simple and subordinate — in the Upside-Downs, in particular, you get the feeling that Verbeck doodled first and then built the story around whatever random thing he decided he could turn on its head. In none of these is there development, either of story or joke. Instead, the strips provide a kind of optical orality. They’re eye candy.

Fred Ott’s Sneeze used to be eye candy too; when the film process was just beginning, anything moving on the screen was a source of amazement. Now, of course, what interest it has is historical. Neither can comics these days survive solely on visual wonder; for the most part, you really do need to make some concessions to plot and genre if you want people to look at your work. Nonetheless, some elements of comics’ infancy survive. Linda Williams, in her study of pornography entitled Hard Core, points out that both Fred Ott’s Sneeze and porn share a common focus on biological ejaculations. Similarly, I think that the emphasis on surface pleasures in McCay and his contemporaries has a later analogue in the cheesecake-inspired drawings of Los Bros Hernandez, and even in the fetish art of R. Crumb or Michael Manning. McCay’s eye candy approach also has an echo in shojo and yaoi (where narrative coherence can takes a distant second to flowery compositional bliss), and in Fort Thunder.

Of course, the comics faction that has most embraced McCay is not shojo or Paper Rad or porn, but art comics. Which is a bit strange, because, as far as I can tell, the aesthetic goals of McCay couldn’t be more different than those of, say, Art Spiegelman. It’s true that Chris Ware has (brilliantly) borrowed a lot of McCay’s style, but this only emphasizes how completely different they are as artists. For Ware, visual repetition is not a source of delight, but of existential monotony — effortless creativity is transformed into labored wasteland.

I don’t blame Ware for the cannibalization of McCay’s corpse — artists take bits and pieces of whatever they can from wherever they can, and they certainly don’t have any obligation to remain true to someone else’s vision. Still, it’s too bad that (to return to Oedipus) the success of the son has so thoroughly obliterated the memory of the father. Which is to say that critics writing about Winsor McCay seem indecently eager to turn him into Chris Ware.

In this regard, the worst sinner in the volume is Jeet Heer. Heer provides an introduction for McCay’s Hungry Henrietta, a black-and-white strip produced at the same time as Little Sammy Sneeze (many of the Henrietta strips are reproduced here on the reverse side of the Sammy strips which ran on the same day.)

The early Henrietta strips start out with her as a baby, being fussed over by grotesquely cavorting adults — at the end of each episode, she is offered a bottle, which she drinks with a single tear trickling from her eye. Over the course of later strips, Henrietta ages, and her appetite develops apace — each episode now focuses on her consuming vast quantities of some foodstuff or other, with the last panel generally featuring her fast asleep in peaceful and bloated contentment. Heer’s interpretation of this is as follows:

“…while overzealous adults are eager to assuage Henrietta’s anxiety, they themselves are the cause of her worries…. By being overprotective, they turn her into a nervous nelly, always whimpering and needing cookies to calm her nerves…. Eventually, Henrietta becomes a slave to her stomach.”

So for Heer, Hungry Henrietta is about the tragedy of eating disorder; it’s a kind of after-school special.

If this argument is to make any sense, you have to assume that (A) McCay has some passing interest in psychological realism, and that (B) McCay believes that being a slave to your stomach is a bad thing. I don’t think that there is any evidence that either of these things is true. On the contrary, the whole point of Henrietta, it seems to me, is not that she experiences some sort of vaguely Oedipal narrative development, but that she doesn’t. She gets older, but the joke is she stays exactly the same. In those early strips, she isn’t driven to eat by the insensitive adults around her; the adults are insensitive and grotesque, from her perspective — because they won’t let her eat. She isn’t sad in those last panels where the tear slides down her face. She’s crying, yes, but she’s calming down — the tear is the last sign of her fading discontent. Anxiety doesn’t make her eat; on the contrary, it’s the fact that she’s hungry which makes her anxious (until she fills up, of course!)

In other words, McCay simply didn’t do literary psychodrama, no matter how much Heer and other arts comics scholars might wish that he did. Rather, Henrietta eats the way that McCay draws; with a simple and tireless delight.

The Butt of the Dream

Posted on by

This review originally appeared in The Comics Journal

Winsor McCay occupies roughly the same place in comics as Shakespeare does in English literature. A crowd-pleasing, intensely accessible entertainer, he is also an artists’ artist, admired by creators in every corner of the medium, from Art Spiegelman to Johnny Ryan, Neil Gaiman to Charles Schulz, Frank King to Alan Moore, Carl Barks to Chris Ware. If any comic artist’s place in the canon is assured, it’s Winsor McCay’s.

It’s that *if* which is the stumbling block, though. Despite huge gains in recent years, comics remain an aesthetically dubious medium — there really is, and probably at the moment can be, no comic that is as solidly and universally validated as Shakespeare, or Hemingway, or any number of other classic works of literature. Everybody who cares may know that McCay is brilliant, but even people who don’t care know that Shakespeare is a genius. Indeed, Shakespeare’s reputation is so overwhelming that it’s possible to read his plays without even noticing their thorough-going vulgarity and silliness. McCay is not so fortunate — or, perhaps, unfortunate. Be that as it may, a casual viewer of a McCay strip is as likely to be struck by the vaudeville schtick, the crude visual humor, or the gratuitous sight gags as he is by the formal and visual invention.

Ulrich Merkl’s collection of McCay’s “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend’ is poised to right this situation through sheer massive presence. Weighing in at 470 enormously oversized pages and $114, this is one of those cultural objects designed to double as a bludgeon. Merkl did almost all the work himself — image research, image restoration, copyright solicitations, scanning, advertising, and a host of etceteras —and the finished product is awe-inspiring. Not only has Merkl provided a impressive selection of the more than 800 Rarebit Fiend strips, but he also reproduces a huge number of other contemporary strips which McCay drew, influenced, or was influenced by. There are also essays by various scholars, a careful chronology of McCay’s life, and several articles which McCay wrote himself for various newspapers back in the day. And, on the included DVD, you can see all the extant episodes of the Rarebit Fiend as well as a copy of one of McCay’s most famous animated features, “Gertie on Tour.”

Naturally, my first reaction when I received this in the mail was, “Holy shit!” And it is, in fact, one of the most impressive coffee table books I’ve staggered around underneath. One hundred and fourteen dollars is a lot of money, but if you can afford to shell it out for this tome, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. McCay deserves every superlative he’s ever received, and this collection is meticulously researched and presented. I do, though, have one suggestion which will vastly increase your reading pleasure: skim the biographical bits if you must, but for God’s sake, skip the critical prose.

This shouldn’t be too much of a burden. After all, who on earth actually reads art books? Nobody but overly conscientious reviewers, surely. And there’s a good reason for that. As I waded through reams of tiny type, the shock and awe began to turn into irritation and boredom. And, inevitably, unpleasant questions began to arise. Yes, an enormous amount of effort went into producing this volume, but to what purpose? For example, Merkl takes pains throughout to point to other artistic works inspired by the Rarebit Fiend. Some of these seem reasonable and convincing — for instance, it’s clear that Frank King’s contemporary “Bobby Make Believe” series was heavily indebted to McCay. The 1935 short live-action film “The Fresh Lobster ,“ also seems likely to have been a direct homage. And it certainly seems possible that the animated Dumbo was inspired by McCay’s visual example in general, and perhaps even (as in the flying-bed sequence Merkl references) in specific details. But there are a whole series of other references which seem, to put it kindly, dubious. We’re really supposed to believe that James Cameron saw episode 243 of the Rarebit Fiend (in which a man bashes a pliable tin soldier) and was thereby inspired to create the pliable metal robot in Terminator II? Or that R. Crumb couldn’t have come up with the idea of an anthropomorphic boiler unless he’d seen Rarebit Fiend episode 49? Or that McCay invented flying saucers even though they were current at least twenty years before he started drawing his strips?

Admittedly, the UFO reference seems like something of a joke — McCay’s supposed “flying saucer” is a drawing of a giant hat. Still, the assertion can be proven wrong with five minutes on Google, which does tend to vitiate the punchline. Besides, McCay is one of the most talented and influential figures in both cartooning and animation. Must he have predicted the future in order for him to be relevant? Does his importance really depend on whether or not he directly influenced recognizable modern figures like Cameron and Crumb?

For Merkl the answer, unfortunately, seems to be yes. Like some latter-day rarebit fiend, Merkl bends, stretches, and twists himself spasmodically, trying desperately to provide a rationale and defense of McCay’s artwork. Annoyingly, all the flailing tends to obscure the actual achievements. For instance, in one article Merkl claims that the Dream of the Rarebit Fiend is weirder and more adult than McCay’s better known Little Nemo. It’s an arguable point — though, to be devil’s advocate, McCay used many of the exact same ideas in both, and the longer narratives in Little Nemo allowed for more intricately absurd storylines. In any case, to make his point, Merkl first rather feebly protests that he doesn’t want “to diminish the quality of Little Nemo,” and then goes on say this:

“A further reason for the greater popularity of *Little Nemo* is its emphasis on optical effect rather than actual content. It is well known that the human brain is much faster in taking in optical impressions than it is in absorbing texts and plots. We are all aware of this phenomenon in our modern society: a film based on a book is nearly always more popular than the book itself and a hit single does not sell at all without a cool video clip accompanying it.”

In other words, Nemo is popular because it’s eye candy for the groundlings, like music videos. More sophisticated viewers, supposedly, will gravitate to the Rarebit Fiend. The problem is that, in denigrating “optical effect,” Merkl ends up undercutting, not just Little Nemo, but McCay’s work in general. Nobody but nobody is going to get through 300 pages of Rarebit Fiend on the plot— it’s McCay’s formal mastery which makes his strips special. Indeed, the belief that visual data and beauty is childish and low-brow is exactly why Merkl feels the need to defend the strips in the first place. In trying to bolster McCay’s cultural position in general, and this work in particular, Merkl helplessly reproduces the sneers of those he’s supposedly repudiating.

The most elaborate effort to salvage McCay for the high-brow, though, is written, not by Merkl, but by Dr. Jeremy Taylor, a “Unitarian Universalist minister” who “blends the values of spirituality with an active social conscience and a Jungian perspective.” This is not, to put it mildly, a propitious set of credentials. Alas, Dr. Taylor’s article fulfills every one of the promises made in the author bio. Atrociously titled “Some Archetypal Symbolic Aspects of “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend,” this interminable screed is devoted to the proposition that McCay is, in fact, Joseph Campbell.

Taylor begins by wondering aloud why it is that no one has ever tried to find the “symbolic meanings” of McCay’s “various artistic dream creations as dreams.” As it happens, I can explain this conundrum: no one has done it because it’s a fucking stupid idea. McCay isn’t Kafka , or even Dali — he’s not especially interested in dreams as a psychological or spiritual phenomena. In the Rarebit Fiend series, especially, dreams are explained entirely and repeatedly by linking them to the digestive system. In fact, many of the strips use dreams simply as a gimmick to set up slapstick or vaudeville type humor. In episode 150, for instance, a man digs through the center of the earth and comes out the other side, where he is set upon by pidgin-spouting Chinese caricatures who beat him with sticks. (But isn’t that a metaphor for all of our dark journeys?)

That isn’t to say that none of these strips have Freudian overtones: episode 137 (printed opposite 150, as it happens) is about a woman who Oedipally transfers her affections from her husband to a ravenous warthog. McCay’s interest in violating the human body in various ways — enlarging variously, noses, heads, legs, arms, ears and every other non-scandalous body part — is also suggestive. And could the ever-mentioned Rarebit be seen as the residue of the Lacanian Real? In any case (and with tongue in or out of cheek) one could certainly use various dream theories to talk about the Rarebit Fiend if one wanted, just as these theories have been used to talk about any number of narrative forms, from literature to film.

But to talk about the comics actually *as if* they are dreams rather than artistic productions ends up — under the guise of making McCay more universal and profound — actually flattening his artistry. For example, Taylor claims that Freud, Jung, Adler, and every other dream theorist who ever swung a beard are all simultaneously correct. He then goes on, with similar ingenuous ecumenicalism, to state that “every dream simultaneously exhibits and reveals all these seemingly different levels of meaning….” Okay — but then what’s so special about Winsor McCay? If everybody’s dreams are equally meaningful, why should we bother with someone else’s? Couldn’t we just make our own? Taylor thrashes around trying to answer this question, even comparing McCay rather desperately to Einstein. His argument, though, eventually comes to rest on the conclusion of each Rarebit Fiend episode. That moment of returning consciousness, Taylor suggests, is a symbol of mankind’s entry into the afterlife. “McCay’s awakening dreamers touch a very deep chord in us when we encounter them, always in the last frame, always one step closer to our own awakening.” A heaven populated by chronic dyspeptics whining about their last dinner is certainly an entertaining idea — whether it actually tells us anything about McCay’s motivations, his interests, or his art is another question entirely.

Taylor’s crankery is, at least, enthusiastically extroverted; it gives the book a breathless amateur appeal (rather like that bestowed on TCJ itself by Kenneth Smith’s natterings.) The most offensive result of the tome’s effort to defend McCay, though, involves an uncharacteristic and wholly unadmirable restraint. Merkl is expansively garrulous on virutally all things Winsor McCay. Every time a reference to circus animals appears in one of the Rarebit Fiend strips, Merkl glosses it with an extensive discussion of McCay’s work in vaudeville and traveling shows. Whenever there is a reference to a mother-in-law, Merkl includes a paragraph or two about McCay’s stormy relationship with his own. When hotels are mentioned, Merkl lovingly includes a paragraph about how much time McCay spent on the road. When a character speaks with a German accent, Merkl explains how and where McCay was likely to have interacted with German immigrants.

On one point, however, Merkl is silent. That is on the subject of race. As anyone familiar with his work knows, Winsor McCay often used vicious racist caricatures in his work. If you page through this volume, you will see many of them. McCay’s first strip was called “A Tale of the Jungle Imps” and featured, in McCay’s words “aggressive Imps, seminaked black children,” decked out in giant blackface lips and cannibal loincloths. One of these barely sentient “imps” became a central character (named “Impy”) in *Little Nemo*. The *Rarebit Fiend*, too, traffics in racist caricature. These are mostly in walk-on parts, but occasionally (as in episode 374) they are used as central figures. In either case, black people are depicted using the most offensive kind of iconography and dialect — when they aren’t speaking a nonsense jungle pidgin, they all spout phrases like “Good lawdy!” and “What ails dis heah bed?”

McCay’s racism is, of course, partly due to his era — northern whites were arguably more racist in the early decades of the twentieth century than ever before or since. It’s also attributable to his roots in vaudeville, where blackface and racial humor were a standard part of the repertoire (in fact, episode 680 seems to be meant to feature a performer in blackface, rather than an actual African-American.) Merkl could have provided this context — and he also could have noted that, as one of the pioneers of comic-strips and animation, McCay’s racism had a long-term negative effect on the representations of blacks in both mediums. Surely this information — involving, as it does, important political and genre concerns, as well as one of McCay’s most consistent motifs — is at least as important as the fact that McCay liked to draw long-necked critters. But Merkl tells us the second repeatedly and never mentions the first…except to note defensively on the back cover that the book will appeal to those who enjoy “the bizarre, the absurd, and the politically incorrect.” So, it seems, we’re so desperate to find something worthwhile in McCay’s art that we have to turn his racism into a selling point — albeit one that even Merkl is a little reluctant to highlight directly.

*************
None of the above is intended to undermine McCay’s reputation. Indeed, I don’t really see how his reputation *can* be undermined. Merkl’s anxiety couldn’t be more baseless. McCay didn’t influence James Cameron; he doesn’t deal in mythopoetic truths; he’s a racist. As far as his status as an artist goes, it couldn’t matter less.

What does matter are strips like episode 306. Perhaps the single most unsettling comic in the book, the opening panel shows a dreamer, eyes closed, exclaiming “Oh! I can’t move!” As the sleeper continues to bemoan his fate, a couple of pretty birds land on his face. Then a centipede crawls up his cheek; the birds build a nest in his mouth, flies start to crawl across his forehead; a pig chews on his neck. And all the time the sleeper moans and shouts — “Oh! Oh! I know I’ll die!…I seem to be smothering too! Oh! Oh! I’m dying!” The panels are arranged in four columns of four, and each image is exactly the same as the last except for the addition of more animals — like much of McCay’s Rarebit work, it’s essentially a series of animated cells laid out on the page. As the panels fill with more and more animals, the simple lines of the pillow and the bed clothes start to read, almost magically, as an outdoor landscape rather than an interior space. The sleeper is literally swallowed by the natural world, and the temporary paralysis of sleep turns into a frightening vision of death — a vision only made starker by the fact that the marauding animals are both oblivious to the sleeper’s fate and incongruously cute. The final panel, in which the speaker awakes to shout “I’ll never forget this dream if I live a million years!” is a well-deserved victory lap — McCay knew that he’d outdone himself.

Though episode 306 is an exceptional achievement, it is also typical of the way in which the Rarebit Fiend series is organized. In Little Nemo, McCay’s formal mastery is employed —not always, but generally — in the service of, or for the delight of, his characters. Little Nemo is the recurring, amazed explorer of McCay’s marvelous worlds. As in many children’s books, the overall point is to create a sense of wonder — McCay is a magician, his technical mastery the pyrotechnic effects which draw “oohs” from both Nemo and the reader.

The relation between form and content in the “Rarebit Fiend” is somewhat different. McCay is still, of course, interested in formal experimentation. But now his talents are used, not to amaze his characters, but to torment them. This applies to 306 —in which the time lapse tour de force is used to paralyze the unfortunate dreamer But it also works for any number of other strips: episode 232, where McCay’s playful use of scale turns some poor schmuck into a football; episode 416, where the panel backgrounds come unstuck and smother the unfortunate protagonist; episode 284, where another dreamer is tormented by the changing orientation of the background; and so forth.

Part of the difference in emphasis is caused by the fact that, unlike Little Nemo, the Rarebit Fiend has no recurring characters. We know almost nothing about each dreamer except for his or her dream — the people in the strip are mere raw material, which McCay grinds up in his mercilessly jovial contraptions. To emphasize their interchangeability further, the dreamers all speak with a kind of aphasiac repetition. The mummified woman in episode 358 who keeps declaring, “Cupid’s darts have made my heart look like a throbbing sponge!” is bizarrely typical. In the *Rarebit Fiend*, dialogue isn’t used to advance plot or show character, but simply to reiterate a complaint over and over, a whine that, in its anonymous persistence, becomes divorced from any actual human utterance and turns into a kind of semi-automated querelousness.

McCay’s absurdist situations and his repetitive language both suggest Beckett, and the two do have a lot in common — not least their love of slapstick. But though Beckett’s characters are atomized and hopeless, their struggles are, for that very reason, ennobling: “I can’t go on…I’ll go on.” In contrast, there isn’t anything ennobling about the trials McCay puts his characters through. Indeed, in the Rarebit Fiend, “man” signifies, not spirit or soul, but simply an iconic agglomeration of limbs and protuberances which exist to be variously mashed and spindled.

Perhaps the best illustration of the difference is in episode 340, which might be titled, “Waiting for Winsor McCay.” A Spanish count calls on a woman, who rejects his love because she is enamored of “Silas” —McCay’s pen name. Driven to madness by the woman’s preference for the “plain rarebit dream artist”, the count tears apart the panel, reducing both the woman and himself to shredded wads of paper. As the last bit of him drops to earth, the count mutters “’Tis sad to die thusly.”

Obviously, this is not Beckett’s spiritual wasteland. But it is, for all that, a wasteland. The Spanish count and the object of his affection are both directly out of melodrama. They’re hollow pasteboard, even before the strip starts to deconstruct itself. The last panel but one is almost all white, with a few scattered bits of paper at the bottom, on one of which we can see a bit of the woman’s horrified face. The last panel is, of course, a picture of the dreamer waking up — but who is dreaming this, anyway? The fake woman? The even less realistic count? No…it’s an elderly lady who wakes up exclaiming “Oh! Me! I had such an awful dream about our oldest daughter just now….” The surprise entrance of a new character to have the dream only emphasizes the arbitrariness of the trope. Anyone can dream anything in McCay, not because we’re all profoundly alike, but because no one is actually there. It’s just lines on paper, the only meaning the craft of the artist, chuckling as he devises another formal nightmare.

Or, to put it another way, Beckett is a humanist — McCay isn’t. But what is he? As I was putting this essay together, I thought at first I might try to compare him to the Italian futurists, who were, like McCay, a lot more interested in mechanism and violence than in morality and love. Then again, I considered drawing a connection to thrash or death metal — a tight formal structure the content of which is its own form celebrated as brutality. But the thing is, both the futurists and metal are linked to actual philosophical and political programs— their nihilism is a conscious, militant choice. McCay is more about the nothing that is not there: his strips really aren’t passionate about anything except their own glorious surfaces. As such, the only comparisons that really work are the most obvious; classic Warner Bros. cartoons, Ernie Bushmiller’s “Nancy”… creations where the laff and the delivery system are ends unto themselves.

No surprise then, that Merkl is rather desperate to find some other meaning — anyother meaning — in the strip. To the extent that comics have managed to gain acceptance in the west, it’s been through the stolidly middle-brow artistic project of spouting universal human truths and universal human pathos. George Herriman or Charles Schulz can be fit into that program with a little shoving, but McCay? His incredible power of invention, his formal mastery, and his preeminent place in history mark him ineradicably as one of the medium’s greatest creators. Yet his comics are so thoroughly and even aggressively shallow that its impossible to talk seriously about them without making oneself look like a fool. He remains, then, comicdoms indigestible bolus; a dish which can’t be refused, but which, when swallowed, brings forth anxious and humiliating visions. Who’s the butt of McCay’s dreams? If you answered “We all are,” then I sentence you to reading every bit of prose in Merkl’s volume. The rest of you are welcome to just look at the goofy pictures.