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Daydreams and Nightmares: The Fantastic Visions of Winsor McCay

by  Winsor McCay

Fantagraphics, $195

Superheroes and manga cross borders more readily than almost anything else in book form, but only recently has anyone paid attention to the history of comics. Dreams and Nightmares,  a selection of work by  influential comic artist  Winsor  McCay, is an essential book for anyone interested in putting together the pieces of 20th-century comics culture.

McCay was the first person to make an animated cartoon (of his Little Nemo strip  in 1909). But animation really took off with McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur, which premiered in 1914 and toured the US.

His influence can still be felt in the strange, often friendly monsters of modern cartoons. Gertie and other McCay beasties, such as the snow-eating monster who mistakenly eats its master, are echoed in Walt Disney and  Hayao Miyazaki. Despite their Shinto-pop feel, even  the Pokemon critters descend, ultimately, from McCay's gentle dinosaur.

Copyright disputes have  meant that  McCay's work hasn't been collected in  one place. Daydreams and Nightmares is a compendium of his non-Nemo work, with a smattering of drawings of Gertie. Also included are examples of Little Sammy Sneeze, about  a boy who inadvertently destroys things by sneezing, and of The Dream of the Rarebit  Fiend (rarebit is a melted cheese concoction) about strange dreams people have after eating heavy dinners.

Many of his strips involve benign bodily distortion. McCay's people, like his gentle monsters and not unlike middle-aged adults, appear genuinely surprised by the bodies they find themselves inhabiting. One wonders if McCay's strip about a child who dreams his feet grow too big for him to walk to school was the model for Robert Crumb's Keep On Truckin.

One of the revelations in reading McCay  is his vision of the US as a fragile entity. What most people think of as American culture is,  in fact, a post-second world war phenomenon,  a solid, sure-seeming time.

It would feel unnatural for Americans to be unsure of the future now, but that wasn't so in the early part of the 20th century. McCay has a penchant for showing New York City, especially the financial district, gloriously destroyed in large panels that resemble Victorian intaglios  of Roman ruins.

McCay contributed to the idea of a comic strip: a story that happens in drawn panels. Visually, comics can't be as intricate as a standard McCay drawing; the visual language needed to tell a story can't be too complex. McCay came from the Victorian tradition, with  its heavy load of detail, and helped bring about modernism, with  its stripped-down aesthetic. One of the delights of reading Dreams and Nightmares is watching a master artist work  out the kinks of a new language.



Daydreams and Nightmares: The Fantastic Visions of Winsor McCay