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Winsor McCay. Bob McCay. Silas. Robert Winsor McCay Jr. These are the names
the strips and illustrations in this new collection are signed under, all of
them the product of one of comics’ most enduring genius. But you’ll never
see the signature of Zenas Winsor McKay, his true name. For many of today’s
readers, the man behind that formidable wall of work remains a remote
figure, a master working in his tower, or maybe one of the upper-floor
chambers in those palatial domed and spired buildings he so loved to draft.
This book, Checker’s fifth McCay collection, shines a sometimes blurry light
down some lesser-explored corridors of his career, hopefully providing some
guidance for the fan of nearly a century’s delay.
This is not a perfect guide to early McCay. Almost as soon as one opens the
book, they’re confronted with a nasty error right in the table of contents:
there are two chapters labeled ‘4’. This does not engender trust in the
historically-minded reader, and one naturally becomes more sensitive to
matters that they might ordinarily gloss over. In a section labeled ‘New
York Editorial,’ we are assured that the contents are derived from The
New York Herald, The New York Evening Telegram, and The New
York American, from 1904-1917. Shortly thereafter, the observant reader
will detect that some of the pieces are dated ‘99,’ and indeed, one of them
comments upon the United States’ war in the Philippines, which was raging in
1899, and concluded before 1904. Perhaps these pieces (maybe created during
McCay’s tenure at Life) were reprinted in New York papers, years
after the fact. We don’t know, and Checker doesn’t tell us. It’s not a
horrible matter, nothing to gnaw at the brain, but simple errors in one
portion of the book make the reader more sensitive to niggling concerns
elsewhere; it’s a natural progression, and one that can be easily snuffed
through more careful editing.
Ah, but the realities of vintage comics publishing have perhaps afforded
Checker some credit. McCay was not merely a superior cartoonist, but an
incredibly prolific one; at certain points from 1905-06 he was
juggling no less than four weekly strips at once (including the
famous Little Nemo in Slumberland), in addition to miscellaneous
editorial and illustrative cartoons. Later, he would cut down to a mere
three weekly strips, while simultaneously performing in a popular vaudeville
show. He was a man obsessed. As a result, there’s a huge amount of material
ripe for collection, yet very little remains in print in the US. Even Nemo
himself is not afforded a readily available in-print archive beyond a single
storyline published by Dover Books; alternate, more comprehensive
collections by Fantagraphics and Taschen have lapsed from cover-price
availability. Checker’s series is dedicated to both expanding the
availability of popular-yet-merely-sampled strips, and presenting
less-familiar works from the dustier corners of the immense McCay catalog.
It’s a noble, necessary pursuit, the quality of material available to
Checker sometimes sabotage their good intentions.
As I’ve stated above, there are five chapters included here. The first is an
extremely short sampling (only ten pages long) of A Pilgrim’s
Progress, a social satire strip that will be familiar to collectors of
earlier volumes in this series. Minimally rendered with a focus on object
labeling and simple iconography, the strip concerns poor Mr. Bunion’s
attempts to get rid of a valise he’s carrying, the words “Dull Care” printed
on the side, representing his inner anxiety. Naturally he never loses it,
though he does encounter similarly-encumbered characters and other
allegorical situations. The reproduction of these strips is quite poor; the
visuals are blurry, lines and scratches sometimes cross the panels, and
detail is often obliterated. Faring even less successfully is the second
chapter, presenting twenty-two pages of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend,
probably McCay’s second most famous work, a collection of miscellaneous
characters suffering from nightmares and strange visions after indulging in
too much delicious toasted cheese. As they have in the past with this
feature, Checker prints the large-format Saturday editions sideways, so as
to preserve McCay’s panel layouts, though the size of the work is
considerably reduced; combined with the already low reproduction quality,
the reader is sometimes forced to squint in order to read the dialogue. The
weekday editions of the strip are presented in standard trade format, but
here the visual quality is so haphazard that certain dialogue balloons are
illegible, and McCay’s famous visual plays on perspective and scale are
difficult to appreciate. And yet, every so often, a pristine-quality strip
will slip through, tormenting the reader with a glimpse of McCay’s crystal
vision.
The rest of the book, fortunately, enjoys a higher level of reproduction
quality. Chapter three gives us forty-six pages of assorted pre-Rarebit
strips of the same formula. Titles include: Midsummer Day Dreams,
Rabid Reveries, Dreams of a Lobster Fiend (shifting the burden
of nightmare onto the sea), and the fully descriptive if somewhat
unimaginative It Was Only a Dream. It’s here that we encounter an
unavoidable byproduct of maintaining the level of output which McCay
provided: repetition. Gags and situations as presented in chapter two are
re-presented here, slightly altered. I presume this is intentional on
Checker’s part, though no editorial comment appears on the topic;
regardless, this is one of the advantages of a project tackling work of this
volume - we see the master chafe against his own prolificacy, and improve on
past ideas (if only the visual quality of the second chapter had let us
enjoy such improvement with greater ease!). Even better is the twenty-one
pages of chapter four, offering up miscellaneous short-lived strips from all
over the McCay bibliography. My favorite was Poor Mr. Nerves, who
spends most of his strip (and presumably, much of his life) enduring
feverish paranoia about every aspect of his existence, always expecting the
very worst. Good comedy. There’s even a tantalizing one-page sample of a
serialized adventure strip titled Dino, about a Gertie the Dinosaur
look-alike who stomps around New Jersey with the military and (naturally!)
her little kid friends in hot pursuit. Plus: there's some alternate versions
of better-known strips, like a faux-A Pilgrim's Progress dubbed I
Should Worry! (with the main character bearing a bundle called "Worry"
rather than the "Dull Care" suitcase), or an errant Little Sammy
Sneeze with the considerably more active title of And
Then---Kerchoo!---He Sneezed!.
The book’s final section (and opposed to what Checker’s site would
have you believe, there’s no Little Sammy Sneeze or Phoolish
Phillip material included) consists of seventy pages worth of editorial
and illustrative cartoons, most of them presented sideways, one per page, so
as to preserve their full dimension (though obviously reduced in size). Some
are captioned, some are not. Some stand alone as a total comment, others
appear to supplement text, which we cannot see. McCay spent much of career
on such work, even after he stopped making comic strips, and his visuals are
lavish and detailed. All sorts of subject matters are covered: there’s
anti-drug material (a cackling devil looms over a pit of damned souls, the
word “DOPE” emblazoned on a cliffside), anti-death penalty work (a woman in
white robes marked “CIVILIZATION” flees in disgust from Old Sparky’s room),
anti-imperialism comment (Uncle Sam is bound to the tree of “IMPERIALISM” by
a Philippine donkey, Uncle Sam is seen throwing piles of US soldiers at a
grossly caricatured native in hopes of winning a cigar, the US is depicting
a Tower of Babel with floors representing Cuba, Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto
Rico), and some even more period-centric jobs (the tiger of Tammany Hall
stalks the White House as Thomas Jefferson glares down from the clouds, his
distaste for the Irish evident). But other illustrations are less clear in
their intent. There’s a suite of gorgeous painted images, all of them
dealing with historical figures roaming the modern world. Some are delighted
(the biblical Eve is impressed by a department store, Sir Walter Raleigh is
titillated by the availability of tobacco) and some are not (Sir William
Penn turns away in sadness from a boxing match, and Benjamin Franklin seems
intimidated by newsboys shilling papers).
And then, there’s James Watt, an innovator in the field of steam power. We
see him sitting in a darkened room, staring at a cityscape of boiling
rooftops, steam and smoke and soot everywhere in the sky. We cannot see his
face. It’s a beautiful but ominous image, the innovator sitting in blackness
as he witnesses how technology has passed him by. It’s hard to fully
understand this illustration, just as it’s hard to comprehend the scope of
McCay’s work. Perhaps the text that maybe once accompanied that image could
fill us in on what it all means. And perhaps with further printings of
Winsor McCay’s work, we can begin to comprehend the greater themes of his
pulsing career. As imperfect as Checker’s effort is, it’s an
extensive effort, and currently that’s something we need.
-- Jog
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Winsor McCay Early Works: Volume V