page_title: Winsor McCay
section_title: Style
hierarchical_section_title: Winsor McCay / Work / Style
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Rip, «&#160;Un projet téméraire&#160;», Imagerie artistique de la maison Quantin, série 5, planche n° 13, 1888
context_page_description: Zenas Winsor McCay was an American cartoonist and animator. He is best known for the comic strip Little Nemo and the animated film Gertie the Dinosaur. For contractual reasons, he worked under the pen name Silas on the comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend.
  From a young age, McCay was a quick, prolific, and technically dextrous artist. He started his professional career making posters and performing for dime museums, and in 1898 began illustrating newspapers and magazines. In 1903 he joined the New York Herald, where he created popular comic strips such as Little Sammy Sneeze and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. In 1905 his signature strip Little Nemo in Slumberland debuted—a fantasy strip in an Art Nouveau style about a young boy and his adventurous dreams. The strip demonstrated McCay's strong graphic sense and mastery of color and linear perspective. McCay experimented with the formal elements of the comic strip page, arranging and sizing panels to increase impact and enhance the narrative. McCay also produced numerous detailed editorial cartoons and was a popular performer of chalk talks on the vaudeville circuit.
context_section_description: Virtually from the beginning, McCay innovated with the forms of his chosen media.  He varied the size and shape of comic strip panels for dramatic effect, as in the second instalment of Little Nemo (October 22, 1905), where the panels grow to adapt to a growing forest of mushrooms.  Few of McCay's contemporaries were so bold with their page layouts.  Near-contemporary George Herriman with Krazy Kat was the most notable example, but it was not until a generation later that cartoonists such as Frank King with Gasoline Alley, Hal Foster  with Prince Valiant, and Roy Crane with Captain Easy attempted such daring designs on their Sunday pages.
  McCay's detailed hatching mastery of perspective enhanced the illusions in his drawings, particularly in Little Nemo.  Fantastic grotesqueries such as what McCay witnessed during his time at the Wonderland and Eden Musee appeared often in McCay's work.  McCay was noted for the speed and accuracy with which he could draw; crowds of people would gather around to watch him paint billboards.
  McCay had a taste for the ornate.  The architecture he drew was inspired by that of carnivals, the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the detailed illustrations in British illustrated newspapers The Illustrated London News and The Graphic.  The Maison Quantin of Paris published a series of illustrated books called Images Enphantines, whose pages bear a striking resemblance to McCay's early Little Nemo strips, both in their graphic sense and their imaginative layouts.
  To Canemaker, McCay had an "absolute precision of line" akin to those of Northern Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer and 19th-century French illustrator Gustave Doré.  McCay drew with Higgins black drawing ink, Gillott No. 290 pens, art gum, a T-square and angle, and an assortment of Venus lead pencils.  In his early magazine cartoons McCay often painted in gouache.
  McCay used metafictional techniques such as self-referentiality in his work. This was most frequent in Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, where McCay sometimes put himself in the strip, or had characters address the reader.  Sometimes characters become aware of the strip itself—a jealous lover tears the very strip apart in which he appears; another character fastens panel borders to his strip when he realizes the artist has forgotten them; and in a Sammy Sneeze episode Sammy's sneeze destroys the panel borders.
  In contrast to the high level of skill in the artwork, the dialogue in McCay's speech balloons is crude, sometimes approaching illegibility, and "disfigur[ing] his otherwise flawless work", according to critic R. C. Harvey.  This is further highlighted by the level of effort and skill apparent in the title lettering.  McCay seemed to show little regard for the dialogue balloons, their content, and their placement in the visual composition.  They tended to contain repetitive monologues expressing the increasing distress of the speakers, and showed that McCay's gift was in the visual and not the verbal.
  In his comics and animation McCay used stock ethnic stereotypes common in his era.  A conscious attempt to offend is not apparent.  He depicted blacks as savages, or wishing they could be white.  Most prominent were a pair of characters in Little Nemo: the ill-tempered Irishman Flip and the rarely speaking grass-skirted African Little Imp.  In the animated Little Nemo, the Anglo-Saxon Nemo is shown drawn in a dignified Art Nouveau style, and controls by magic the more grotesquely caricatured Flip and Imp.  Women were few in McCay's work, and were depicted as superficial, jealous, and argumentative; the Princess in Little Nemo never partook in the camaraderie the males shared.
caption: Pages from Images Enphantines displayed the same sort of formal playfulness as in McCay's work
  Rip, "Un projet téméraire", 1888
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