Daydreams and Nightmares by Winsor McCay

McCay’s fantastic succession of ice caves and Italian palaces, jungle islands, Manhattan shantytowns, and Martian landscapes-it survives to be enshrined by Maresca, in part because people refused to throw it away. Not even the summer of love San Francisco Oracle at its most convolutedly psychedelic could equal that visionary splendor. For Nemo, McCay invented a sort of native art nouveau-an American vernacular filled with trick angles, distortive mirrors, and playfully deranged scale-that drew on Alphonse Mucha and the vogue for japonaiserie, carnival posters, and Coney Island. Little Nemo in Slumberland transformed the funnies page into an Arabian tapestry of organic forms, sinuous lines, and overall patterning-complete with proto-cinematic sequential action, predicated on meticulously calculated cycles of transformation and growth.

(He was also a prodigious workhorse who almost incidentally pioneered the American animated cartoon: Fantagraphics’ newly reissued Daydreams and Nightmares: The Fantastic Visions of Winsor McCay provides a career overview, complete with writings.) McCay had almost no formal art education, but he was a master of perspective and an extraordinary draftsman. Born in the Midwest, he spent eight years working in a Cincinnati dime museum before becoming a newspaper cartoonist in 1903, he entered the big time, joining The New York Herald. The full-color Sunday funnies were born in the late 1890s, and with McCay (1867–1934), they produced their greatest exponent. Yesterday’s trash, tomorrow’s treasure: Peter Maresca’s Little Nemo in Slumberland: Splendid Sundays, a spectacular centennial celebration of cartoonist Winsor McCay’s magnum opus, painstakingly restored, presented in authentic hues and blatantly uncommercial full broadsheet format, exemplifies the old Marshall McLuhan paradigm by which an obsolete form is transformed into an objet d’art. Wildly poignant, then, and almost utopian, to revisit the period, more or less a century ago, when five-cent Sunday papers competed to provide disposable art for the masses.

Hardly a morning goes by that you can’t find an obit for the American newspaper-not just posted online but written on the old fish wrap as well. Who wants today’s? The president is hardly the only fellow who’s got no use for the daily press.

What was then evanescent now seems obsolete. Who wants yesterday’s papers? So the young, petulant Rolling Stones demanded as if they always knew that they were destined to rival death and taxes.

Daydreams and Nightmares by Winsor McCay