A Brief History on the Dual Life of Winsor McCay
The Palace Theater in Chicago was silent the night of February 8, 1914 as a lone well-dressed man stepped onto stage out of the darkness. The man was Winsor McCay, a cartoonist known for crafting imaginative comic strips for the New York Herald and New York American, he was carrying a whip. No one in the audience knew what to expect as McCay began talking about something new called “animation,” this was a vaudeville act, a stage play, after all. Then McCay turned to the film screen beside him and introduced “the only dinosaur in captivity.”
That was when Gertie, a full-grown Brontosaurus, poked her head out of a cave on the screen. The audience muttered to each other as McCay continued to coax Gertie out, several members coming to the conclusion that the dinosaur before them was nothing more than a paper mache animal with men inside of it in front of a scenic backdrop. But, as McCay continued his act, the audience couldn’t help noticing the trees in the background blowing in the breeze and that there were ripples on the surface of the water next to the cave. By the time Gertie threw an elephant into the lake, the audience knew they were witnessing something truly new.
For the finale, McCay walked offstage and “reappeared” in the film where Gertie lifted him onto her back, he bowed to the audience as she lumbered away. The audience came expecting to see their favorite cartoonist, maybe a live drawing performance, they left knowing they had seen a wizard performing sorcery. McCay was a master.
He appeared, like many of his creations, seemingly by magic. Due to the lack of documentation of the era, the exact date and place McCay was born is unknown. His grave marker in Brooklyn reads 1869, however, a different date and place can be found in both the 1870 and 1880 Michigan census reports which state that Zenas Winsor McKay was born in 1867 in Canada. His parents, Robert and Janet, were from Ontario, but moved to Spring Lake, Michigan in 1867 when Robert got a job with an American entrepreneur, Zenas G. Windsor, Winsor’s namesake. At some point, Robert decided to change the family name’s spelling to McCay and Winsor came to be known by his middle name.
McCay started drawing very early in life and never stopped. He once stated that the greatest contributing factor to his success was “an absolute craving to draw pictures all the time. This was in me – I did not decide that I would draw pictures anywhere and at any time. I didn’t say to myself, ‘I must keep in practice or I must improve my drawing.’ I just couldn’t stop drawing anything and everything.”
According to a story told within the family, McCay made his first drawing in the aftermath of one of the many fires that hit Spring Lake when he “picked up a nail and etched the scene of the fire in the frost of a windowpane.”
McCay’s earliest artistic jobs were as a painter of posters and signs for traveling circuses. He would move to Cincinnati, Ohio in his early twenties where he would begin his career in the newspapers. First, illustrating stories for the Times-Star and then drawing political cartoons for the Commercial Gazette. In 1893, he accepted a full-time position at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where he would eventually draw his first comic strip. A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle was based on poems written by George Randolph Chester and would run in the Enquirer from January until November of 1903. The strip would result in McCay getting offers from newspapers in New York City.
McCay would end up signing a contract with James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s New York Herald. He arrived in New York City in October of 1903 bursting with ideas for possible comics. However, when he arrived, he was assigned to doing illustrations and editorial cartoons.
McCay’s visions would be unleashed upon the printed page in what was destined to be the year that would make him a household name, 1904. He would begin this whirlwind year by seeing his first continuing comic strip, Mr. Goodenough, debut on January 21, 1904 in the New York Evening Telegram, an evening edition newspaper published by the Herald. It would run irregularly until March 4th of the same year. The strip was based around a formula of an idle millionaire seeking out ways to become more active, with embarrassing results.
Soon after, McCay’s first strip with a child protagonist, Sister’s Little Sister’s Beau, appeared in the Herald. It lasted one installment that April. Not dissuaded, McCay quickly followed it up with his first color strip, Phurious Phinish of Phoolish Philipe’s Phunny Phrolics, which appeared once in the Herald’s Sunday supplement that May.
McCay would earn a slot on the Herald’s cartooning staff when he finally landed his first popular continuing strip that July. For the strip, McCay would once again create a child protagonist, this time with terrible hay fever. Little Sammy Sneeze was a strip where McCay would begin his experiments with, amongst other things, what was possible in the comic form, the principles of animation, and what resulted from sequential changes in characters’ movements within a static background.
Each week, usually within six panels, Sammy would feel a violent sneeze coming on in a variety of settings. By the fifth panel, the sneeze would occur, unleashing all sorts of chaos. Then, in the final panel, Sammy would be kicked out of whatever place he was at. The formula for the strip may have been simple, but the magic came from how McCay would play with the medium to display the destructive power of each sneeze. This simple setup would repeat itself for the strip’s entire duration, ending on December 9, 1906.
McCay quickly followed up on his popular strip with the first of two strips that would come to define his career and push the boundaries of what was possible in the medium of comics. Dream of a Rarebit Fiend debuted on September 10, 1904 in the Evening Telegram under the pen name “Silas,” which was done for contractual reasons. The strip had no recurring characters, but it did have a recurring theme, one that McCay would continue to examine for the better part of his career; dreams.
In each episode of Rarebit Fiend, an unfortunate character has a bizarre dream, often a nightmare. In the closing panel the dreaming victim awakens and blames the dream on the Welsh rarebit, a cheese-on-toast dish, that they ate just before bed. Like Sammy Sneeze, the formula remains the same from strip to strip, the true power and enjoyment of the series comes from how McCay crafts and displays the wild dreams of the characters. Unleashing phobias, discomforts, and any number of dark fantasies upon the page, Rarebit Fiend was an instant success with readers. It displayed marital, money, and religious matters in a negative light, often with biting social commentary.
Rarebit Fiend was so popular that McCay would even end up signing a contract to “collaborate in the production of a comic opera or musical extravaganza to be known as ‘The Dream of the Welsh Rarebit Fiend!’” Sadly, no stage production ever came to fruition. The series would, however, become McCay’s longest-running, lasting for twenty years with 821 episodes published.
McCay would begin the new year with a bang, releasing The Story of Hungry Henrietta on January 8, 1905. The strip starring a little girl with a tremendous appetite would only last until July 16 of that year, but it would act as another testing ground for McCay’s thoughts on animation. Each character would change poses and gestures while the background remained static. Not just that, but each week Henrietta would visibly age, starting as a baby and growing into a little girl by the series end. Week after week, Henrietta is given food instead of the love she actually wants, soon becoming a compulsive over-eater that devours entire picnics, iceboxes, and even food that has fallen on the floor.
June 26, 1905 saw the appearance of the second strip pinned under the “Silas” moniker, A Pilgrim’s Progress by Mister Bunion. The strip, which ran until December 18, 1910, followed Mr. Bunion as he tried desperately through scheme after scheme to get rid of his burden, a suitcase labeled “dull care,” only to have it returned to him no matter what he does. McCay was within a peak creative period that seemed to have no end as he continued to stretch and experiment with his style. By July, McCay had four strips running simultaneously, he seemed to be everywhere at once, but nothing could prepare readers for what awaited them at the end of the Sunday comics section that October.
If dreams from the darker side of life inspired McCay’s Rarebit Fiend, the other side of the coin would come to inspire what would become McCay’s most famous strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland. In 1905, McCay got “an idea from the Rarebit Fiend to please the little folk.” Utilizing the same formula he did in Rarebit Fiend, but featuring a child protagonist, Little Nemo hit the ground running on October 15th. The full-page color strip would star a little boy, based on McCay’s son Robert, who has fantastic dreams that are always interrupted by him waking up in the last panel. Named Nemo, Latin for ‘no one,’ the boy would go about slowly uncovering the secret mysteries of Slumberland every Sunday. The general public fell in love with the boy instantly.
McCay was at the height of his skill in the Little Nemo series, utilizing an Art Nouveau style where objects and characters in the foreground were outlined thicker than the background, creating a feeling of distance and perspective. On top of that, McCay used an abstract color palette. This was heightened by the skills of the Herald’s printing staff whose method of color printing were deemed superior to all other newspapers of the time and allowed for a grand rainbow of colors to be utilized within the strip.
In an era before television, radio, and magazines, the Sunday funnies offered readers a vast cornucopia of colors and fantasies. Audiences did not just read these comics; they entered them and Nemo was the most enchanting of them all. People from every walk of life, from intellectuals to street vendors, would discuss Nemo. Within the first year the strip was translated into seven foreign languages. Victor Herbert built a lavish operetta adaptation that opened on Broadway in the fall of 1908. Merchandise was produced, including everything from articles of clothing to playing cards and games. McCay became a celebrity and household name around the world.
Due to his newfound fame, McCay was approached in mid-April 1906 by a representative of F.F. Proctor, famous vaudeville producer and theater owner, to do quick sketches on a blackboard of his famous characters for audiences. Many cartoonists of the day found doing these “lightning sketch” acts to be an easy way to make extra money and promote their comic strips to the general public.
McCay signed a lucrative contract to perform at one of Proctor’s premiere theaters during the weeks of June 11 and McCay’s act consisted of him drawing twenty-five sketches in fifteen minutes as the band played a piece called “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend.” He would also do a routine he referred to as “The Seven Ages of Man,” in which he would draw two faces and progressively age them before the audience’s eyes. It was the beginning of a successful career on the vaudeville circuit where he’d soon premiere his efforts in animation.
It began with a bet. McCay was having a drink at a bar near the Brooklyn Bridge after a long day of work with some of his newspaper friends, among them George McManus, Tom Powers, and Thomas “Tad” Dorgan. McManus got to teasing McCay about how fast he could draw and ended in him betting McCay that he make several thousand drawings, photograph them onto film, and show the results in theaters. The scene would later be reenacted for a live-action portion in his first animated film, Little Nemo.
Animated on 6 X 8” sheets of translucent rice paper, McCay created over 4,000 drawings over the course of 1910 in between his comic strip and illustration work and his vaudeville appearances. Premiering in theaters on April 9, 1911 and then in McCay’s vaudeville act on April 12, Little Nemo would be the first film to bring a comic strip character to the big screen as animation.
1911 would be a big year for McCay for another reason. Having become frustrated with his contract with the Herald, McCay would accept a higher-paying offer that sprung from rival newspaper, the New York American. The American was run by William Randolf Hearst, an intimidating figure in the newspaper world who would one day be parodied, much to his dismay, as Charles Foster Kane in the cinematic classic, Citizen Kane. McCay was delighted by the new opportunity and, although the Herald held the copyright to Little Nemo, McCay won a lawsuit that allowed him to continue to use the characters at the American, which he did under the title In the Land of Wonderful Dreams. It would be a career move, however, that would end up being the beginning of the end for McCay.
Hearst would soon grow irritated with McCay’s busy vaudeville schedule and would go so far as to pull any advertisements for McCay’s performances from his papers. Hearst would also grow disappointed with the quality of McCay’s newspaper work. Hearst’s right-hand man and editor, Arthur Brisbane, would remark that “McCay is serious, not funny.” This would lead to McCay being forced to give up his comic strip work to focus on editorial illustrations, often written by Brisbane. By February 1917, Hearst had managed to muscle McCay into giving up vaudeville entirely and all other paid work outside the Hearst empire.
Throughout all this, McCay would end up creating 10 animated films between 1911 and 1921, including several Rarebit Fiend adaptations and the groundbreaking film, Gertie the Dinosaur. Pioneering naturalistic motion and character personality traits in animation, as well as the inclusion of Trompe-l’oeil details, an optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface. Through his films McCay would set the standard for character animation that would not be surpassed until the golden age of The Walt Disney studio in the mid-1930s.
Eventually, after 12 years, McCay had finally had enough and left the American. He would return to the Herald to revive his beloved strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland starting August 3, 1924. Unfortunately, after years of being confined to daily editorial cartoons dictated by others, the spark was gone from his weekly comic. It was discontinued on December 26, 1926.
If there is a silver lining in all this, it was that due to the lack of success, the Herald signed over all copyrights for Little Nemo to McCay for one dollar. Today, McCay is remembered as the first master of two American art forms, comics and animation. As for Gertie and Nemo, they’re still marching through dreams looking for a slumberland to call their home again.
References:
- Winsor McCay: His Life and Art by John Canemaker
- “The Cartooning Genius of Winsor McCay” by Robert C. Harvey
- Daydreams & Nightmares: The Fantastic Visions of Winsor McCay edited by Richard Marschall
- The Complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend edited by Ulrich Merkl
- Dreams in Motion: The Art of Winsor McCay by John Canemaker
- “The Greatest” by Stefan Kanfer The Magazine of the Library of Congress: Civilization Volume 5, Number 3
- “Winsor McCay” by John Canemaker in Film Comment Jan-Feb 1975
- The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum