Daydreams and Nightmares by Winsor McCay

They are neither comedy nor dramatic, and not enough samples are provided to get a real handle on the strip. The stories are odd I’m not sure how to qualify that. Pilgrim’s Progress has a high contrast graphic quality to it (the protagonist wears a black suit and tall black hat) that is well complemented by its sparse compositions. The following three chapters hold a sixty page selection of McCay’s various comic strips, including Pilgrim’s Progress, Little Sammy Sneeze, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, and various dream strips. The most impressive features a flying ship passing a open-air city with greek colums separating tree-filled levels. These images present scenes of the future. The second chapter features a few “Newspaper Fantasy Illustrations” from 1903-1912. The linework is obscured and the painting is not a decent replacement. They appear to be painted in color and reproduced in black and white, ending up rather grey and muddy. The style of this series is also extremely unusual for McCay. A very strange series of images in this section are titled “If Should Come Back to Earth.” The subjects, from Shakespeare appearing at a theatrical syndicate to Eve at a bargain sale, are often oblique, perhaps losing something in the century since they appeared (why does William Penn appear at a boxing match?). Even this early, McCay’s drawing skill is impressive with his precise line work and realistic representations.

Amongst a few political illustrations, there are rudimentary comics, sequential illustrations really, that tell brief vignettes in six or eight images. The first chapter focuses on magazine work from 1898-1903. He begins with “The greatest contributing factor to my success was an absolute craving to draw pictures all the time,” and ends with “Work! WORK! That’s all there is to cartooning.” Not bad advice, though a little bit of studying helps too. The book starts off with a few introductory texts: a brief overview by Richard Marschall and two pieces by McCay, one on his animation work and a letter to a woman about becoming a cartoonist. While there is little here to expand one’s appreciation of McCay’s innovation with the formal elements of comics, there is plenty of room for marveling at his drawing skills and prodigious imagination. Daydreams and Nightmares collects a large sampling of his non-Nemo work.

Daydreams and Nightmares: The Fantastic Visions of Winsor McCayīest known for the pioneering Little Nemo in Slumberland strip, Winsor McCay was a prolific artist of both comic strips and illustrations.

Daydreams and Nightmares by Winsor McCay