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About Winsor McCay: Early Works Volume 1
Product Description A comprehensive, fully re-mastered collection of turn-of-the-century rarities from cartooning and animation pioneer, Winsor McCay: "Tales of the Jungle Imps," "Little Sammy Sneeze," "Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend," and "Pilgrim's Progress." Best known for Little Nemo in Slumberland, and the seminal animated feature Gertie the Dinosaur, McCay puts his artistic talent and whimsical humor on full display here. From Publishers Weekly McCay, one of early newspaper comics' major figures, delighted in seeing how a sequence of graphic images could lead readers to imagine reality transformed. The form best suited to that experiment, McCay found, was the dream, as in his famed "Little Nemo in Slumberland," that filled a page with glorious hijinks before returning to the waking world in the last panel. In the first section of this collection, "Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend" (19041914), people who have eaten rich foods have nightmares (e.g., a woman dreams her alligator skin purse becomes a real alligator that grows large enough to swallow her whole, then wakes up vowing never to overindulge again). The book also includes "Little Sammy Sneeze" (1903), whose eponymous protagonist always does his thing at the most inopportune moments; and "A Pilgrim's Progress" (19051910), a modern, secular version of Bunyan's tract, in which the melancholy traveler tries hopelessly to ditch his enormous valise. Readers may be uneasy with the racial and ethnic stereotypes innocently employed here (and rather strangely spotlighted on the cover), and they'll surely feel baffled when they encounter forgotten events, customs and slang (reading such old works requires as much mental gear-shifting as picking up a Japanese manga). However, McCay's art nouveau draftsmanship is superb, and it's fascinating to watch him experiment with the comics medium, as when Little Sammy's sneeze shatters the strip itself, leaving him staring at the reader out of a heap of panel surface and pieces of the border. Even in these early, relatively minor works, McCay's genius amazes and delights. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist McCay, the first great comic-strip artist, is most admired for "Little Nemo in Slumberland," about a small boy's dream adventures in a world of intricate architecture and astonishing changes in the sizes of figures and settings. McCay forged the situation and some characters of "Nemo" during the years 1903-10 in the strips generously sampled here: "Tales of the Jungle Imps," "Little Sammy Sneeze," "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend," and "A Pilgrim's Progress." The imps of the "Tales," a set of Just So Stories knockoffs, reappeared in "Nemo" (unfortunately, some think, because of their appearance--like Bart Simpson in blackface). Sammy Sneeze prefigures Nemo as a little-boy protagonist. "Rarebit Fiend" anticipates the dreaming and dream world of "Nemo," though with a new dreamer in each installment. The allegorical "Pilgrim's Progress" is dreamlike and focuses, like "Nemo," on a single protagonist. As in "Nemo," each episode of these series is a self-contained narrative; the richness of McCay's artwork, especially notable in "Little Sammy Sneeze," makes them forerunners of the graphic novel. And several episodes remain hilarious. Ray Olson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review Readers for whom this very highly recommended collection will be their first exposure to McCay's legendary newspaper comic strip, will also be interested in reading the Daily strips collected in the Checker series Winsor McCay: The Early Works (along with other material from the period). James Cox --Midwest Book Review About the Author Winsor McCay began his artistic career in the 1890's, yet the sheer innovation of his images still leaps from the pages. He was a master illustrator, with a talent for draftsman-like precision, natural perspecitve, brilliant co
