page_title: Dream of the Rarebit Fiend
section_title: Overview
hierarchical_section_title: Dream of the Rarebit Fiend / Overview
context_page_description: Dream of the Rarebit Fiend is a newspaper comic strip by American cartoonist Winsor McCay, begun September 10, 1904. It was McCay's second successful strip, after Little Sammy Sneeze secured him a position on the cartoon staff of the New York Herald. Rarebit Fiend appeared in the Evening Telegram, a newspaper published by the Herald. For contractual reasons, McCay signed the strip with the pen name "Silas".
  The strip had no continuity or recurring characters, but a recurring theme: a character has a nightmare or other bizarre dream, usually after eating a Welsh rarebit—a cheese-on-toast dish. The character awakens in the closing panel and regrets having eaten the rarebit. The dreams often reveal unflattering sides of the dreamers' psyches—their phobias, hypocrisies, discomforts, and dark fantasies. This was in great contrast to the colorful fantasy dreams in McCay's signature strip Little Nemo, which he began in 1905. Whereas children were Nemo's target audience, McCay aimed Rarebit Fiend at adults.
  The popularity of Rarebit Fiend and Nemo led to McCay gaining a contract in 1911 with William Randolph Hearst's chain of newspapers with a star's salary.
context_section_description: Winsor McCay first produced Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in 1904, a year before the dream romps of his Little Nemo and a full generation before the artists of the Surrealist movement unleashed the unconscious on the public.  The strip had no recurring characters, but followed a theme: after eating a Welsh rarebit, the day's protagonist would be subject to the darker side of his psyche.  Typically, the strip would begin with an absurd situation which became more and more absurd until the Fiend—the dreamer—awakened in the final panel.  Some situations were merely silly: elephants falling from the ceiling, or two women's mink coats having a fight.  Other times, they could be more disturbing: characters finding themselves dismembered, buried alive from a first-person perspective or a child's mother being planted and becoming a tree.  In some strips the Fiend was a spectator watching fantastic or horrible things happen to someone close to themself.  The protagonists are typically, but not always, of America’s growing middle-class urban population whom McCay subjects to fears of public humiliation, or loss of social esteem or respectability, or just the uncontrollably weird nature of being.
  Rarebit Fiend was the only one of McCay's strips in which he approached social or political topics, or dealt with contemporary life.  He addressed religious leaders, alcoholism, homelessness, political speeches, suicide, fashion, and other topics, whereas his other strips were fantasy or had seemingly vague, timeless backgrounds.  The strip referenced contemporary events such as the 1904 election of Theodore Roosevelt; the recently built Flatiron Building (1902) and St. Regis Hotel (1904) in New York City; and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05.
  The rarebit is a dish typically made with rich cheese thinned with ale and served melted on toast with cayenne and mustard mixed in.  McCay used it despite its innocuousness—cultural theorist Scott Bukatman states rarebit was not the sort of dish a person would associate with having nightmares.
  McCay's most famous character, Little Nemo, first appeared in the first year of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, on December 10, 1904.  In 1905, McCay had Nemo appear in his own strip in the New York Herald.  In comparison to Little Nemo, the artwork of the Rarebit Fiend strips had minimal backgrounds, and were usually done from a static perspective with the main characters often in a fixed position.  The content of Rarebit Fiend played a much bigger role than it did in Little Nemo, whose focus was on beautiful visuals.  The stories were self-contained, whereas the Nemo story continued from week to week.  The dreams in Nemo were aimed at children, but Rarebit Fiend had adult-oriented subjects—social embarrassment, fear of dying or going insane, and so on.  Some of the dreams in both strips were wish-fulfillment fantasies.
  Unlike most comic strips from the time, Rarebit Fiend is not (directly) humorous or escapist.  The strips highlight readers' darker selves—hypocrisies, deceitfulness, phobias, and discomfort.  They offer often biting social commentary and show marital, money, and religious matters in a negative light.  McCay had an interest in pushing formal boundaries, and playful self-referentiality plays a role in many of the strips; characters sometimes refer to McCay's alter-ego "Silas" or to the reader.  Though frequent in Rarebit Fiend, this self-referentiality does not appear in McCay's other strips.
  In contrast to the skilled artwork, the lettering in the dialogue balloons, as in McCay's other work, was awkward and could approach illegibility, especially in reproductions, where the artwork has normally been greatly reduced in size.  McCay seemed to show little regard for the dialogue balloons, their content, and their placement in the composition.  They tend to contain repetitive monologues expressing the increasing distress of the speakers, and show that McCay's gift was in the visual and not the verbal.
caption: McCay introduced Little Nemo in Dream of the Rarebit Fiend.
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