Winsor McCay biography

Zenas Winsor McCay (26 September 1869 - 26 July 1934; Spring Lake, Michigan, USA)

Winsor McCay is one of the founding fathers of newspaper comics and animated cartoons. An extraordinary artist, his vivid and technically complex drawings are still impressive today. As a comic artist, McCay made several series featuring dreams or nightmares. He devoted large colorful drawings to these fantasy sequences, which appeared on full pages in Sunday newspaper supplements.

Out of all his comics, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (1904-1911, 1913) and Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1914) are his best known works.

Born in 1869 in Spring Lake, Michigan, his father was a retail grocer, notary public and real estate owner. Winsor McCay never completed grade school, but received early art instruction from one of his teachers. From an early age, he enjoyed drawing, and impressed spectators with his eye for detail and talent for creating images from memory.

He was also an avid reader, particularly enjoying the Bible, William Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats and Percy Shelley. At age 17, McCay went to Chicago for more art lessons and started designing posters and advertisements for the Kohl & Middleton Dime Museum and Philip Morton's printing and lithography company. Five years later, McCay moved to Cincinnati, where in 1897, he started his career as a newspaper cartoonist, first for the Cincinnati Times-Star, followed by the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, and eventually ending up at the Cincinnati Enquirer.

At the Cincinnati Enquirer, McCay created his first Sunday color feature, A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle (1903). Based on a series of poems written by George Randolph Chester, the comic ran for 43 episodes between 11 January and 9 November 1903. Before the final two installments were published, McCay had already moved to New York City. Once there, he joined The New York Evening Telegram and Life Magazine, drawing cartoons and other illustration work under the pseudonym "Silas".

On 24 July 1904, Little Sammy Sneeze debuted in the New York Herald. Every episode revolves around a little boy with the annoying tendency to sneeze loudly at an inappropriate moment. People in his vicinity panic, fragile objects shatter and even the heaviest people, animals or objects suddenly disappear in the air. Sammy's sneezing power is so tremendous that windows break, buildings collapse and elephants are catapulted away. In one memorable gag, Sammy sneezes, breaking the panels of his comic strip into pieces. Most episodes end with him being sent away, often with a kick in the backside.

Little Sammy Sneeze is the first comic strip where McCay's graphic and narrative skills are perfectly balanced. Sammy's sneeze always takes place in the penultimate panel, but from the start we see the boy's nose gradually twitching, building up to the "KAW… CHOW!" punchline. In the early days of the medium, running gag newspaper comics were fairly common, but McCay's masterful craftsmanship enhanced the quality of the repetitive material. His attention to detail and dynamic portrayal of movement made the exaggerated situations funnier and more believable. 'Little Sammy Sneeze' was the artist's first successful comic strip, lasting more than two years, and was his first comic to be translated abroad. In France, it enjoyed popularity as 'Petit Sammy Éternue'. Little Sammy sneezed for the last time on 9 December 1906.

In 1904, he created several short-lived daily comics: Mr. Goodenough (21 January to 4 March 1904), and two one-shots, Sister's Little Sister's Beau (24 April 1904) and Phurious Phinish of Phoolish Philipe's Phunny Phrolics (28 May 1904). The artwork of these early graphic experiments were already impressive in their rendering. McCay was famous for being a fast cartoonist, who could draw any object with amazing accuracy. Much of his visual style was inspired by the Art Nouveau movement. McCay spent the rest of the decade working extensively for both the New York Evening Telegram and the New York Herald, newspapers published by James Gordon Bennett.

Despite his heavy workload of daily comic strips and cartoons, Winsor McCay launched three additional comic features over the course of 1905, including The Story of Hungry Henrietta, which ran in the New York Herald on Sundays between 8 January and 16 July 1905. The comic features a baby that ages progressively in every episode; a rare phenomenon in comics in general, and in 1905 particularly novel. Constantly fed by her parents and family members, Henrietta eats practically everything in her vicinity. It is believed that McCay based Henrietta on his daughter, Marion. Given that the workaholic cartoonist barely had time for his family, the strip may be interpreted as an expression of the cartoonist's guilt. Henrietta was one of the first female protagonists to appear in a comic strip, although she was preceded by Charles Keene's 'Miss Lavinia Brounjones' (1866), Gene Carr's 'Lady Bountiful' (1901) and Grace Drayton's 'Toddles' (1903-1933, later renamed 'Dolly Dimples').

A couple of months after concluding Hungry Henrietta, Winsor McCay introduced the Sunday readers of the New York Herald to his most iconic creation, Little Nemo in Slumberland. Debuting on 15 October 1905, the Nemo character was inspired by Winsor McCay's son, Bob McCay. Nearly a year earlier, McCay had already featured a little boy called Nemo in the 10 December 1904 episode of 'Dream of the Rarebit Fiend'.

But while his new comic strip also had a sleeping protagonist who awakes in the final panel, 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' was set in a dream world with a very different feel to it. 'Little Nemo' was intended as a children's series with recurring characters, and following a continuous narrative. Although the early episodes have a stop-and-start format, and still contain nightmarish aspects, within a few months, the tone turned towards fantasy and elaborately detailed dream sequences with the storylines continuing from week to week. As Nemo dreams, he wanders through Slumberland until he finds himself in surreal situations, which he escapes by waking up. Yet the storyline continues in the next episode, always interrupted by him falling out of bed in fear - which became one of the most iconic scenes in comic history.

In a memorable sequence, Nemo's bed sprouts legs and walks outside into the starry night. He meets a green, cigar-smoking dwarf in a big hat named Flip. At first he is untrustworthy and often gets Nemo into trouble, but later he becomes a good friend. Another recurring character is Impy, a black African in a grass skirt coming from a cannibal tribe. Impy was similar in design to characters in a previous McCay comic series, 'A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle' (1903). Nemo eventually visits Slumberland, where King Morpheus has summoned him to become a playmate for his princess daughter. There, he gets caught up in all kinds of epic adventures, including a trip to the moon on an airship.

McCay took full advantage of his Sunday pages. He experimented with color, perspective and even the lay-out of the pages. The panels often change size or shape to complement what happens in the story. A Thanksgiving episode, for instance, has a gigantic turkey devouring Nemo's house. The bird itself is shown as a central image inside a circle to show its monstrosity. Around the circle we see Nemo falling down.

Little Nemo in Slumberland is also the earliest example of a comic strip receiving serious attention from critics and being perceived as actual art. In 1905 and 1907-1910 it was performed as a theatrical play. McCay himself adapted 'Little Nemo' into a 1911 animated short.

Two attempts have been made to adapt 'Little Nemo' into a feature film, but both met with little commercial success. Arnaud Sélignac's 'Nemo' (1984) starred Harvey Keitel as Flip and changed a lot of the original narrative. Masami Hata and William Hurtz made a 1989 animated feature film, 'Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland' (1989), with contributions by such legends as Moebius and Hayao Miyazaki. In 2022, Francis Lawrence released another film adaptation, 'Slumberland', though with a girl protagonist instead of a boy. The comic additionally inspired children's storybooks, video games and a 2012 opera. The United States Postal Service honored Little Nemo as part of its 1995 set of Comic Strip Classics postage stamps.

His inventive use of framing and lay-out was decades ahead of its time. As an animator, he adapted his own comics into short films, with equally sophisticated brilliance. Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) and The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) are two examples of McCay's innovative animation.

He pioneered the "inbetweening" technique, and his work was noted for the realistic movement of his characters. McCay showed the creative possibilities of both comics and animation, and has been influential in the work of countless visual artists. Together with Wilhelm Busch, Lyonel Feininger and George Herriman, he is one of the most influential comic pioneers.
Source: Lambiek

See WINSOR MCCAY ART.