Winsor McCay: Early Works, Vol. 1 (Early Works) - Softcover

Winsor McCay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0974166405 ISBN 13: 9780974166407

Publisher: Checker Book Publishing Group, 2003

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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 color theory and an imagination that has never yet been rivaled.

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.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Checker Book Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0974166405
• ISBN 13: 9780974166407
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200