Winsor McCay: The Master Edition (review)

Figure 1.

In the early 1970s, when I was a graduate student in New York, the local recognized historian of the animation scene was cartoonist, animator, and story man Izzy Klein. Klein had been in the industry since its very early years, where he had worked for the Hearst Corporation, Walt Disney Productions, Famous Studios, and Terrytoons. At the last of these studios, he was the cocreator of Mighty Mouse. A modest man, he spoke with the quiet assurance of someone who knew where all the bodies were buried. Klein once told me how he attended a special dinner organized in 1927 by his colleagues to honor artist and pioneer animator Winsor McCay. Although still active as an editorial cartoonist, McCay hadn't animated in years and his famous weekly page "Little Nemo in Slumberland" recently had been terminated. McCay died in 1934, only a few years after this event. Following the dinner, McCay was introduced by Max Fleischer, who praised the artist's work and credited him with inventing animation. A breathless audience sat expectantly as the master rose to speak. "Animation should be an art," McCay said. "That is how I conceived it. But as I see what you fellows have done with it, is making it into a trade. Not an art, but a trade. Bad luck!" Then he sat down.

McCay's speech not only passed into animation legend, but became a paradigm for the condemnation of much commercial animation. While John Randolph Bray, whose Bray-Hurd Process Company controlled the key patents to the cel method, is seen as originating the Fordist practices that dominated American industrialized animation production for decades, McCay has become the patron saint of independent animation, with advocates stressing how McCay worked alone and how he eschewed the use of labor-saving processes. For example, Norman Klein noted that "McCay could not comprehend how animation might become a rationalized factory process." Michael Barrier opined that "McCay's methods were radically at odds with rapid production on a regular schedule."¹ The irony is that McCay himself may have invented the technology and processes that were necessary for the development of the factory system that ground out animated films like sausages, speculation that McCay maven John Canemaker supports with the evidence from the filmmaker's papers: letters and royalty checks from Bray as McCay's share of licensing fees.²

By the time of his death in 1934, McCay had come far from his modest beginnings in Woodstock, Ontario in 1867. Raised in Michigan, Winsor McCay attended a business college in Ypsilanti, but he spent most of his time in nearby Detroit, working at Sackett & Wiggins' Wonderland, a dime museum that featured curios and freaks. There, McCay drew souvenir pictures for patrons. He received training from John Goodson, who ingrained the young artist with the importance of the laws of perspective, which forever marked McCay's style. McCay moved on to design circus posters and work for a dime museum in Cincinnati, which further reinforced his fondness for sideshow grotesqueries and sensation. More respectable employment followed as an artist/reporter for Cincinnati newspapers, where he introduced his first comic strip. Freelance work at Life led to a move to New York and positions at James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald and Evening Telegram. McCay's entry to the American publishing capital in 1903 came at the peak of a press war between magnates Charles Anderson Dana, Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and Bennett in which the "funny pages" were a vital factor. McCay's first New York comics, including "Little Sammy Sneeze" and "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend," were popular, with the latter inspiring a film by Edwin S. Porter in 1905. McCay's weekly page "Little Nemo in Slumberland" was a phenomenon, inspiring multiple product spin-offs, from children's shoes to a Victor Herbert–scored operetta Little Nemo (1908). Most importantly, beginning in 1906, McCay had a profitable sideline as...