Animator and academic John Canemaker has reissued his comprehensive bio Winsor McCay: His Life and Art.

Give a kid a train set and watch him go to town. When Orson Welles had Hollywood served to him on a silver platter in 1939, he took all the filmic toys set before him and made Citizen Kane. Likewise, when publisher James Bennett gave up-and-coming cartoonist Winsor McCay a page all his own every Sunday in the New York Herald starting almost exactly 100 years ago, Winsor claimed every square inch. He called his new full-page, full-color art nouveau adventure Little Nemo in Slumberland. In the end, Little Nemo didn’t just bring McCay and his paper artistic and financial success — it shouldered the whole comics medium into the ranks of High Art. Comics and comic artists have been trying to live up to the accolade, and to Little Nemo, ever since.

October 2005 marked the centenary of Little Nemo, and, thanks to renewed interest in McCay and his work, it’s never been easier to see artifacts of McCay’s masterwork in living color. America and its libraries hate old newsprint, as chronicled by Nicholson Baker in his incendiary Double Fold, and no one in 1905 expected a day-old news rag to fulfill duties beyond that of fishwrap. And yet, despite 10 decades of general apathy, a few dedicated preservationists have saved Little Nemo and the rest of McCay’s bibliography for posterity.

Most comic artists have at least a passing acquaintance with the Little Nemo strip, and animators are hip to McCay’s groundbreaking short, Gertie the Dinosaur — but did you know McCay invented the horror comic? That by 1921, two years before Disney signed the contract to make his Alice comedies, McCay had produced three science fiction animated shorts whose draughtsmanship alone wouldn’t be matched until 1937’s The Old Mill?

Most comic artists have at least a passing acquaintance with the Little Nemo strip and animators are hip to McCay’s groundbreaking short Gertie the Dinosaur (above). © 2003 Milestone Film & Video. All rights reserved.

Animator and academic John Canemaker, author most recently of The Art and Flair of Mary Blair, has just reissued Winsor McCay: His Life and Art, a comprehensive bio of McCay informed by unique and wonderful raw materials from the late artist’s estate. A Canadian native, Winsor Zenas McCay was born in 1867 and had his first commercial art job in 1889 making circus posters in Chicago. After a decade spent pumping out advertising ephemera for local Dime Museums, two Cincinnati newspapers took him on as staff, and his employers and the general public quickly discovered he had an unmatched gift for perspective drawing.

McCay had an almost otherworldly ability to draw scenery and characters from top to bottom without pencil roughs, his strokes interrupted only by ink refills, and Canemaker’s book proudly displays crisp reproductions of dozens of examples of the master’s best illustrations.

In 1903, McCay was discovered by the New York papers, and he worked for two competing sheets at once, creating children’s comics for one and adult strips (under the pseudonym “Silas”) for the other. For the Evening Telegram, he created Dream of the Rarebit Fiend and A Pilgrim’s Progress; for the Herald he invented Little Sammy Sneeze, The Story of Hungry Henrietta and, finally, Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran continuously from 1905 to 1911 until McCay was lured afield by William Randolph Hearst.