One of my great heroes
Winsor “Silas” McCay (1869 –1934) was a cartoonist for the Hearst papers. Dude was enormously prolific and incredibly innovative — his surreal comic strips still stand as some of the best sequential art, ever.
Why is it that the first guys in any new medium are often unsurpassed by the people who follow?
If he’s remembered much at all today, it’s usually for creating some of the very first moving cartoons. Which he did all by himself. By inking, like, ten thousand key frames by hand.
The most famous is Gertie the Dinosaur, which he took on the road as a Vaudeville act. Where you see the speech panels in this YouTube version is where McCay would stand on stage talking and appearing to interact with Gertie on-screen. It must have been a corker of an experience for people who had never seen a cartoon before!
Hearst didn’t like McCay to be on the Vaudeville circuit, though, so he pulled strings to choke off his stage career. Which suits me — so many more McCay comic strips!
The most beautiful is the Little Nemo in Slumberland series, but my favorite will always be Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend.
It depicts the terrible dreams people have after eating toasted cheese just before bed. Sometimes funny, sometimes creepy, often spectacularly drawn and always trippy, this has been one of my favorite bedside books for decades. My copy has damn near fallen to bits.
So you can imagine my squee when I discovered there were 190 large-format Saturday strips I’d never seen before. Found the book by accident and ordered it straight away.
It’s funny. I can’t really find one good “representative strip” that gives a full idea of McCay’s talent. I think you have to see dozens in aggregate to see what a flipping genius the man was. But click here to see the full panel this one goes with.
Then imagine, like, 500 hundred more.
February 18, 2012 — 12:18 am
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