Gutbrain Records

Tuesday, 18 January 2005

Winsor McCay: Early Works IV (published by Checker) is now available in some book stores, and over the weekend I finally began reading Early Works I. It starts strong with the well known Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend comic strips, a sharp contrast to Little Nemo in Slumberland, McCay's most famous work. The former is a black-and-white dissection of adult anxiety, the latter a frothy, full-color confection of childhood fantasy.

The very first rarebit-induced nightmare is a shocker. A man is trying to cross Broadway in New York City, and with each attempt a speeding car runs over one of his limbs until he's completely dismembered. The final panel of the strip is an eerie echo of the dream, the carefully placed boots beside the bed recalling the man's severed legs, his head visible on the pillow but no body apparent beneath the sheet.

Other memorable nightmares include a woman who stops a speeding train by headbutting it, a man who can't extinguish a lighted match no matter what (it stays lighted in a bucket of water), a woman whose dentist uses a crowbar and dynamite for a tooth extraction, a woman whose lovers kill each other in a duel and are processed into cat food, a man whose endless perspiring floods the city, etc. Winsor McCay was a brilliant artist with an astonishing imagination, and my brief descriptions of these strips don't do them justice.

The Rarebit Fiend strips in this first volume of Winsor McCay: Early Works appeared in newspapers during the years 1904-1914. Some of them will be familiar to those who have read Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, a book originally published in 1905 but thankfully reprinted by Dover more recently. The Dover edition includes stills from the 1906 Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend movie, as well as some good introductory material, such as McCay's own preface to the 1905 collection, in which rarebit — "melted cheese tempered with brown October ale" — is the subject of mock historical and scientific analyses.

The first volume of Winsor McCay: Early Works also includes Tales of the Jungle Imps (1903), Little Sammy Sneeze (1904-1906) and A Pilgrim's Progress (1905-1910).