Long before the cartooning innovations of Charles M. Schulz, there was Winsor McCay. Preceding his masterpiece, Little Nemo In Slumberland, McCay drew a comic strip called Dream of the Rarebit Fiend that I featured very early in this blog’s existence, here and here (sorry, the video isn’t embedded).
McCay the artist dominated the industry, but McCay the man was dominated by his wife Maude. The portrait of Maude is how she looked when she met McCay. They had a whirlwind romance and eloped in 1891. If Maude looks young, that’s because she was 13. Some accounts give her age as 14, while others say she was still briefly 12 after she ran off with McCay, who was 10-12 years her senior, depending on Maude’s true age. McCay made phenomenal amounts of money for a time as a cartoonist, animator and vaudeville performer, while Maude spent his money and allegedly took lovers. There were public difficulties, such as the account published in The New York Times on December 23, 1914 (click image to enlarge).
A new, complete collection of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, is available for the modest sum of $133 US. The Boston Sunday Globe has a nifty slideshow about it that you can watch by clicking here. The video player has a Rarebit cartoon by McCay, called ‘Bug Vaudeville’. Be prepared, however, because it’s long, repetitive and tedious.
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I don’t know how many more visual motifs there are by McCay waiting to be associated with later works by others. McCay himself borrowed from Alice in Wonderland, OZ, and others. He was very much a cartoonist with a style representative of the Art Nouveau era.
OK, just one comment before I take a break. The Globe slideshow is both superb, and unsettling! To think, that all these bizarre flights of fancies in OTHER venues had seemed so “original!” Why do I get the feeling we’re only touching the tip of the iceberg here?