THE MAN WHO BROUGHT THE FUTURE
The Art of Winsor McCay
For most of the public, McCay is only known as the author of Little Nemo. But if you investigate a little—and read him thoroughly—the intelligent reader will see that Zenas Winsor McCay was much more. A complete artist, a visionary, someone who not only illustrated the discovery of the unconscious better than anyone else alongside psychological currents, but also someone who immersed himself in bohemian life, freak museums, major newspapers, baseball, politics, and projected graphic narrative, animation, illustration, and drawing into the future. Ladies and gentlemen, the first great classic of the 20th century… Winsor McCay!
This sequence is from 1907 and corresponds to page number 86 of “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” published on Sunday, June 30 in the New York Herald. It’s 115 years old and still modern! It’s a perfect testimony to how McCay revolutionized the world of illustration, creating images that challenged the conventions of his time and that maintain their relevance to this day.
From Zenas to Winsor: The Origins of a Drawing Genius
Zenas Winsor McCay is believed to have been born in Spring Lake, Michigan, sometime in September between 1867 and 1871. The date and place of birth are still under discussion because his tombstone, his interviews, his obituary in newspapers, and public censuses say different things, even suggesting he might have been born in Canada, where his parents were from. What is certain is that his family came from the McKay clan of Scotland and that his father Robert, who had been a lumberjack, a member of a Masonic lodge in Woodstock, and was now—in Michigan—a budding real estate entrepreneur, was married to Janet Murray and named the baby in honor of his patron, Zenas G. Winsor, a successful businessman from Spring Lake.
About the change in the spelling of his surname, McCay humorously recounted: “Three Scotsmen from the McKay clan were looking for a fourth member to fight against four members of the Irish McGee clan… ‘I am not one of you,’ my father pointed out. ‘You see, I am from the M-c-C-A-Y clan.’ And that’s how I got both my name and my sense of humor.”
In his childhood, young Zenas made his drawing abilities known, but as his parents wanted to turn him into a businessman, in 1886 they sent him to study at the Cleary School of Business in Ypsilanti. But destiny had something else in store for him. There, in that Detroit suburb, young Zenas met John Goodison, an old stained glass painter who had created his own method of teaching drawing to young people based on the intensive study of representing basic geometric shapes in three dimensions.
Goodison taught him color theory and techniques and the strict application of the fundamentals of perspective and figure blocking in space, which McCay used extensively throughout his career as an artist. This training was fundamental in developing his ability to represent complex figures in motion, something that would later become his trademark. Discover how to master these essential fundamentals of geometric drawing by clicking here, and learn the same techniques that revolutionized 20th-century illustration.
Three years later, McCay traveled to Chicago with the dream of studying at the Institute of Art, but due to lack of money, he sought employment at the National Printing and Engraving Company, where he learned to work with the latest lithographic techniques, creating advertising posters for circuses and theaters. This experience gave him a deep knowledge of image reproduction that would be invaluable in his future career.
In 1889, young McCay moved to Cincinnati, where he would live for more than ten years. There he began working for Kohl and Middleton’s Vine Street, a dime museum where he not only developed as an artist. “Dime museums” were dark entertainment venues for the lower classes, and from there emerged popular artists such as escape artist Harry Houdini or vaudeville performers like the comedy duo Weber & Fields.
The Vine St. dime museum was a sad, dark floor, but McCay represented it in his posters as a building with a grand facade and magnificence, which attracted the public. In these places, curiosities, phenomena, and extravagances were exhibited, from exotic animals to people with unusual physical characteristics, presented as attractions. It was in this fascinating environment, among wax dolls with moving parts and glass eyes, in front of trick mirrors and surrounded by all that circus life, where Winsor found himself as an artist.
This immersion in the world of popular entertainment not only allowed him to learn acting and magic techniques but was also key to his artistic development: here he dropped his first name and was ready for what was to come. Also, during those days in Cincinnati, he met who would be the love of his life: Maude Leonore Dufour, with whom he would form a family and who would be his companion throughout his creative life.
On the left, we can see the Cleary Business College in Ypsilanti, in a photo from 1905, where McCay studied in an attempt by his parents to get him to pursue business. On the right, an advertisement for the Vine St Dime Museum in Cincinnati, circa 1890, the place that served as a true school for McCay’s artistic development.
The Birth of an Innovator: First Steps in the Press
The turn of the century finds Winsor McCay creating black and white journalistic illustrations for various local newspapers. In the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, he created hyperrealistic lithographs with meticulous patterns and a series of proto-comics that illustrated Jack Appleton’s humorous verses. But it is in the Enquirer where the 43 episodes of his first daily strip appeared between January and November 1903: “The Tales of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle.”
Here McCay illustrated full-page texts by George Randolph Chester about a series of misadventures and conflicts between Gack, Boo-Boo, and Hickey—three imps representing natural forces—and imaginary animals that consult with a monkey called Dr. Monk to solve the conflict. Felix Fiddle—an alter ego of the authors—is the civilized and passive observer. Already in this first work, McCay demonstrated an extraordinary mastery of composition and a sense of movement that would distinguish him throughout his career.
About this great first work, John Canemaker, McCay’s biographer, notes: “for the first time he brought together all his eclectic talents in a cohesive graphic style. On each page, he found new ways to combine his exquisite drawing technique, dynamic staging, sense of caricature, mastery of perspective, and sense of movement with his version of the decorative art nouveau style.” This fusion of techniques and styles would be a constant in McCay’s career, always seeking to expand the expressive possibilities of drawing.
From his experience as a graphic reporter, McCay developed a drawing system he called “memory sketching,” a technique that allowed him to easily represent human figures and animals, both static and in motion, and in the ideal pose. This system allowed him to quickly draw complex scenes without the need for direct reference, something revolutionary for the time. The dynamism so evident in his pages was crucial for him to stay several steps ahead of his contemporary colleagues.
Comics had already existed in North America for several decades, but Winsor McCay was already challenging that language in his first daily strip! His innovations in composition, perspective, and visual narrative laid the groundwork for what would later become his masterpieces.
“The Tales of the Jungle Imps” represented McCay’s official debut in the world of comic strips. In these pages, one can already appreciate his characteristic precise line and his mastery in creating detailed fantastic worlds.
More than a hundred years later, in 2006, the original pages (which were believed to be lost) of this first series were donated to The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library by an anonymous young man who found them in a cardboard box on a shelf in his family business. Examining these originals, it was noted that they were the only pages hand-colored by McCay.
As this was his first strip, perhaps the artist thought he wasn’t sure how the newspaper printers would follow his color guides and wanted to make sure they were reproduced exactly as he had conceived them. We’ll see that this would change in his future works, when he had more confidence in the printing processes and could focus exclusively on drawing.
In the image, we see Winsor McCay at the drawing board, in a photo circa 1906, focused on his work. On the right, we can see how he was portrayed by his friend and colleague from the Herald, Cliff Sterrett, who was also a tremendous artist of the time. This camaraderie among artists was common in the newsrooms of major newspapers, where much of the artistic talent of the era was concentrated.
The Conquest of the Big Apple: The Rise of a Comics Master
The following year, “Tales of the Jungle Imps” had made Winsor McCay famous enough to be recruited by James Gordon Bennett Jr., the owner of the New York Herald and the New York Evening Telegram. So he moved with his family to New York, the city that would provide the stage for him to develop his most important and revolutionary works. In the metropolis, McCay exponentially multiplied his production, with “Mr. Goodenough” appearing in The Evening Telegram on January 21, 1904; and in the Herald “Sister’s Little Sister’s Beau,” McCay’s first strip with a child as the protagonist, which only lasted one issue in April; and also “Phurious Phinish of Phoolish Philipe’s Phunny Phrolics,” which appeared in the Sunday supplement in May.
By contract, for his Evening Telegram comics, McCay used the pseudonym Silas, inspired by the name of a man who passed by the NY Herald newsroom every morning with his garbage cart, and who was affectionately nicknamed that way. This detail demonstrates how McCay found inspiration in the everyday characters he observed around him, mixing the most unbridled fantasy with elements of daily life.
During that time, more titles would arrive for the Herald: “The Story of Hungry Henrietta” and the strip that would truly make McCay popular, “Little Sammy Sneeze,” which would continue until late 1906. This story was about a boy whose sneeze would build up panel by panel until it was released, with explosively disastrous results, for which he was generally punished. The strip premiered in July 1904 and lasted until December 1906.
In both “Hungry Henrietta” and “Little Sammy Sneeze,” both from 1905, the search for movement appears, prefiguring the contributions the author would make to animation film. McCay was particularly interested in capturing the essence of movement in the static medium of paper, a challenge that would lead him to develop revolutionary techniques. Want to perfect the art of representing movement in your drawings? Explore specialized resources here and take your illustrations to the next level.
These two strips overflow with graphic concepts that were part of the author’s search for the moving image. Also notable was the construction of the story under the gag procedure, perhaps influenced by his training in vaudeville theater. In “Little Sammy Sneeze,” McCay brilliantly played with narrative time, building a growing tension that culminated in the explosion of the sneeze, thus creating a perfect visual rhythm.
Also in that prolific 1904, he reappears in The Evening Telegram signing as Silas his longest strip: “Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend” (1904-1913). This comic was aimed at an adult audience and had no fixed characters. The premise was simply that the characters would have fantastic, sometimes terrifying dreams, only to wake up in the last panel, cursing a Welsh dish (with melted cheese on toast, the rarebit) they had eaten the night before, which they blamed for causing the nightmare.
In “Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend,” McCay was able to explore much more adult and complex themes and situations than in his other strips. The characters in these stories were ordinary citizens who found themselves immersed in extraordinary situations within their dreams, whether it was a child’s mother who was planted and turned into a tree or just another member of the urban middle class who feared losing their status or simply couldn’t bear the anguish of existence.
In this page from “Dream of a rarebit Fiend,” another of McCay’s passions appears: baseball. The artist was a fervent fan of the Cincinnati Reds, and he frequently incorporated elements of this sport into his works. His love for baseball also reflects his deep connection with American popular culture of the early 20th century.
The World of Dreams: The Door to the Unconscious
It is in the “Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend” series where a world emerges that is more akin to the concept of the unconscious developed during the 19th century by authors of philosophy or psychology (“The Interpretation of Dreams” by Sigmund Freud was published in 1899) than to the adventures of costumbrista humor that flooded the comics of the time. These strips by McCay are even ahead—at least from the script—of the surrealist movement, which would not officially take shape until after World War I.
What is extraordinary about McCay is that he was visualizing the unconscious, that unexplored territory of the human mind, at the same time that Freud was theorizing it. And he was doing it through a popular medium like comics, bringing complex psychological concepts to a mass audience, probably without being aware of the significance of his work in that aspect.
“Rarebit Fiend” was so popular that a collection of books appeared in 1905 from publisher Frederick Stokes. It was also adapted to film by Edwin S. Porter, and plans were made for a “comic opera or musical show” in theaters, which did not materialize. The versatility of McCay’s work allowed these adaptations to different media, something that would also be characteristic of his later works.
It could also be said that “Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend” anticipated a series of recurring ideas in popular culture, such as giant monsters ravaging cities, later popularized in characters like King Kong or Godzilla. One of the most famous installments of the series shows a man dreaming that he grows out of control until he becomes a giant who destroys New York, an image that decades later would become a recurring topic in science fiction cinema.
McCay had a unique ability to construct visual nightmares with a surprising level of detail and realism. His urban panoramas and dreamlike landscapes expressed both the collective fears of emerging industrial society and the personal anxieties of his characters. Click here to explore advanced techniques for creating worlds and fantastic scenarios, inspired by the visual legacy that McCay left us.
Of course, that dream world glimpsed in this comic would explode in the next graphic adventure of the genius from Spring Lake, a work that would catapult him to international fame and that would become his most enduring legacy.
Little Nemo: The Masterpiece That Revolutionized Comics
With the precedent of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” (1865), stories of children lost in a fantastic world were abundant in the literature of the time (The Wizard of Oz is from 1803 and Peter Pan from 1904). But no one until then had created stories like this, with such a graphic narrative display. We’re talking about Winsor McCay’s most known and beloved work by the public: “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” which appeared in the Herald in full color on an autumn Sunday in 1905.
The first page of “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” which appeared in the New York Herald on Sunday, October 15, 1905, marks the beginning of what many consider McCay’s masterpiece and one of the most important moments in the history of comics.
The protagonist was now a fixed character: he was a boy named Nemo (“nobody” in Latin) who dreamed of amazing adventures that always ended with him waking up and falling out of his bed. The first episode begins with King Morpheus sending one of his Oomps to bring Nemo to Slumberland. The boy was inspired by his own son, little Robert McCay; and in each weekly installment, McCay’s visions were not limited to any particular time or place and were filled with surreal or downright absurd moments.
The reader could see Nemo fighting with Native Americans, battling giants, enjoying a ride on a huge condor, cutting down George Washington’s cherry tree, receiving a kiss from a princess, visiting Jack Frost’s ice palace, traveling through the countryside in a dragon’s mouth, or sailing with a band of pirates. McCay’s imagination seemed to have no limits, and each week he surprised his readers with new landscapes and fantastic situations.
But what was truly surprising beyond the literary script were the innovations that McCay brought to the language of comics of that time, which was still in its infancy. Taking advantage of the large 16×21 inch space given to him by the Sunday edition of the Herald, McCay imagined incredible page layouts and a graphic narrative unprecedented until then.
His handling of depth of field, his sequences in vertical panels, his metamorphoses, his framing and cropped planes (those zoom-ins and zoom-outs, before they existed in cinema!), his alteration of reality always coherent with the graphics, his tireless search for movement, and that brilliant and vibrant color, which must have been then like looking at a hologram of Japanese music bands, the latest animated Marvel or Disney movie, or playing with virtual reality is now.
A sequence of Little Nemo in which McCay shows off framing, closure, and timing in his graphic narrative never seen before. The color is also narrative, as is the design of the dialogue balloons in a descending line. Each visual element is carefully calculated to convey both the story and the sensations that the protagonist experiences. Click here to master the composition and visual narrative techniques that revolutionized sequential art.
All of this not only makes Little Nemo the first great comic classic of the 20th century, but also a creative shot into the future triggered by McCay, since comics would revisit many of his concepts more than fifty years later. His innovations in panel arrangement, the use of color as a narrative element, and the representation of movement were so advanced that it took decades for other artists to fully assimilate them.
Soon, and as a natural successor to this fantastic comic, the brilliant artist would dream of taking his stories and characters beyond paper. The next step was, obviously, animation film, a field in which McCay would also be a pioneer and revolutionary.
From Paper to Screen: The Animation Revolution
The success of Little Nemo led to theatrical adaptations on Broadway and an animated short film, simply titled “Little Nemo” in 1909, while the strip continued to be published in the Herald until early 1911. On April 30 of that year, Little Nemo began to be published in the New York American and other newspapers of the famous magnate William Randolph Hearst, with the new title “In the Land of Wonderful Dreams.” This new stage of the series lasted until July 26, 1914.
On the left, we see McCay at home, with Maude and their children Marion and Robert, who inspired the creation of Nemo. On the right, we can observe McCay drawing Bob personifying Nemo, during a fundraising gala for disabled children, in the summer of 1908. These images show us the family side of the artist and how his personal life influenced his creative work.
The idea of cinematically adapting Little Nemo arose one morning when McCay observed his children playing with a flip book. He told himself how important it would be to put his images in real motion. And although by then Emile Cohl and James Blackton had already taken their first steps in the art of animation, he wanted to join that handful of pioneers who were exploring the possibilities of the new medium.
He then made four thousand drawings on rice paper and filmed at Vitagraph Studios with his vaudeville actor friends—including John Bunny—and a colleague of his, also a great comic artist, Geo McManus. All this work resulted in the brilliant animated Little Nemo of 1909, a milestone in the history of animation film. McCay’s dedication and meticulousness in this project was extraordinary, especially considering that he did it while continuing to produce his daily comic strips.
From the second decade of the century, McCay developed an important career as an animator. Notable short films include “How a Mosquito Operates” (1912) and especially “Gertie the Dinosaur” from 1914, which was a success in theaters for its presentations with intertitles and variety shows. “Gertie” is particularly significant because it represents one of the first examples of animation of characters with a defined personality, setting a precedent that all subsequent productions would follow.
Winsor himself began at that time to perform theatrical “chalk talk” acts, which greatly attracted the public. These live presentations consisted of drawing quickly in front of the audience while narrating stories, and culminated with the projection of his animated films. The most famous of these presentations included Gertie, where McCay seemed to interact with the animated dinosaur, even “entering” the screen at the end of the show.
But Hearst, starting in 1917, jealous that he was neglecting production for his newspapers, through a leonine contract prohibited him from performing again. This restriction was a hard blow for McCay, who greatly enjoyed direct interaction with the public and the possibility of showing his creative process live.
Confined to drawing illustrations that interested him little for the North American magnate’s publications, Winsor McCay nevertheless managed to independently produce, with the help of friends and neighbors, “The Sinking of the Lusitania” in 1918, for which a whopping 25,000 drawings were produced. This film, which recreated the sinking of the British ocean liner by a German submarine during World War I, is considered the first animated documentary in history and a masterpiece of realistic animation.
A few years later, “The Flying House” (1921) was left unfinished, after which he never tried to animate again. This master, who invented many of the techniques used to this day by 2D animation such as drawing the first and last step and then the intermediate steps, the use of registration marks and tracing paper, the mutoscope action viewer, and the cycle of drawings to create repetitive action, did not, however, receive recognition in his lifetime from the area to which he was contributing. Are you passionate about animation? Discover specialized resources to develop your sequential drawing skills here, following in the footsteps of the pioneer who revolutionized this art.
After his death, for too long his work remained hidden, although his influence on film history would later be evident through the work of Disney, Fleischer, and Tezuka. These great masters of animation acknowledged their debt to the technical and narrative innovations that McCay had introduced.
From left to right: a frame from the film about Little Nemo that mixed live action with animation (1909), where McCay appeared alongside his fellow artists before showing his animated creation. The poster for “Gertie” (which inaugurated the dinomania that would increase with sound cinema) showing the friendly dinosaur that conquered the public. And an advertisement for “The Sinking of the Lusitania” (1918), which promoted the film as “the first drawn record of the destruction of innocent lives.” Three films by Winsor McCay, foundational to animation cinema.
A voice as authoritative as Chuck Jones said: “The most important pioneers of North American animation are Winsor McCay and Walt Disney; although I doubt whom to put first.” Walt Disney himself would tell McCay’s son, during the recording of a television tribute in 1955: “Bob, all of this should be your father’s,” pointing through a window at the lavish Disney studios. This confession from Disney reflects the late but sincere recognition of the industry towards the true pioneer who laid the foundations of the art of animation.
The Twilight of a Genius and His Enduring Legacy
By the third decade of the century, McCay’s fame in daily strips had already become worldwide, and his comics were published in different languages, Spanish, Italian, French. In 1926, McCay would restore Little Nemo to the pages of the New York Herald until 1926, but without achieving the success of the character’s first era. The world had changed after World War I, and public tastes had too.
After cutting ties with Hearst, McCay realized that he didn’t have most of his originals. The few he could rescue, moreover, after his death were mutilated to adapt them to new editorial formats, and others burned in a fire in 1930. This loss of originals is a tragedy for art history, comparable to the destruction of masterpieces of painting.
Some late works by McCay were these illustrations for the Chicago Herald and Examiner (1929-1930), which were not fantastic at all, but represented realities of American society that prefigured the years of the Great Depression. In this final stage of his career, McCay returned to his journalistic roots, using his art to comment on the social problems of his time. Give life to your own illustrations with social impact by following this link and learn to convey powerful messages through drawing.
On July 26, 1934, Winsor McCay died at his home from a sudden cerebral collapse. His remains rest in the Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn. The unfortunate history of the work left by Winsor McCay, his comic pages, his illustrations, and his original film strips—with frames hand-painted by himself!—would merit a much longer study than this.
But we can say that his films have miraculously reached our days, overcoming the negligence of family members, media entrepreneurs, and, above all, thanks to a handful of fans like Mendelsohn, Brotherton, or his biographer Canemaker, who have also rescued his graphic work, rummaging in attics, disseminating it, and valuing it from the ’60s onwards. Without this work of recovery and preservation, it is possible that much of McCay’s legacy would have been lost forever.
“Little Nemo in Slumberland,” from Sunday, May 6, 1906. It is said that the New York Herald had the best color printing technique of all newspapers, as it used a new technique created in 1876 and called the “Ben Day process or dots,” the printing dots that years later would be made famous by the plastic artist Roy Lichtenstein. This printing quality allowed McCay’s creations to shine in all their splendor, something fundamental for a work so based on color and visual detail.
In the meantime, the memory of the great Winsor McCay had been devoured by superhero comics and sound animation cinema. But in the last forty years, he has enormously influenced the work of great artists as different as Moebius, Frank Quitely, Miyazaki, Bill Waterson, or Chris Ware. The echoes of his visual style and his boundless imagination can be found in contemporary works such as “Calvin & Hobbes,” “Akira,” “Jimmy Corrigan,” or “The Incal.”
Today we know that his unique and eternal art is the great treasure to which future creators of illustrations, comics, or animations can return to marvel, learn, and continue to bring a bit of the future to today’s art. Become part of this artistic tradition by exploring our resources for visual creators and discover how you can develop your own graphic language inspired by the masters of the past.
Long Live, Mr. McCay!
