In Cincinnati, McCay once again found himself working in a shabby dime museum, Kohl & Middleton’s. His office was a dingy room on the top floor, where he could look down and see pickpockets lurking around the ticket window. It was there that he designed posters for the museum’s various shows—“Transient and Permanent Curiosities without number,” read one that also boasted “Freaks, fun and frolic from foreign lands for fictions fancy.” The shows often featured performers like the midget Jennie Quigley, whose alias was “the Scottish Queen”; or Anna Mills, known by most as “the girl with the prodigious feet.” The poster for “Wild Man of Afghanistan,” another popular attraction, billed its star, rather long-windedly, as “a good-natured and harmless colored giant who pushed a handcart down in the West End. But when chained up and eating raw meat, and growling maniacally, he was a fearsome-looking object and drove sleep away from the cots of many boys and grown-ups, too.”
McCay left the dime museum in 1896, after Charles J. Christie, editor of Cincinnati’s Commercial Tribune, noticed his work. Using the punchy language of an emphatic newspaper editor, Christie made McCay an offer to come work for him: “The same money you’re getting at the dime museum and I’ll make a newspaperman out of you. The best god-damned newspaper cartoonist in the country, that’s what I’ll make of you!”
“Where can I hang my coat?” McCay replied.
Many great artists had started their careers working for newspapers. Winslow Homer, William Glackens, and John French Sloan had all once done stints as “artist-reporters,” drawing depictions of recent news events. The pictures were reasonably accurate, but like all great artists, these men knew that stretching the facts here and there could sometimes illustrate a larger truth. It was a lesson that was also understood by the first generation of animators, many of whom had also started their careers working for newspapers, drawing cartoons and comic strips while honing their senses of humor and satire.
While at the Tribune, McCay began submitting cartoons to the leading humor magazines of his day: Life, Puck, and Judge, where his art broadened into sharper commentary. When the United States began fighting in the Philippines in 1899, he published a cartoon of a pistol-packing Uncle Sam in a carnival game, flinging doll-size U.S. soldiers at a Filipino’s head and asking, “Is the Game Worth the Candle?” The cartoon was exquisitely drawn, as were all his drawings, and editors at other publications took note. Life, Puck, and Judge were the magazines they read to find new talent.
In 1900, Winsor took a job with the Cincinnati Enquirer, rival to the Tribune, after it offered him a higher salary. His work there took on a new dimension, more surreal and full of playful fancy. In 1903, he began publishing a comic strip entitled The Tales of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle, a spoof of both Charles Darwin and Rudyard Kipling. In each installment, various jungle animals sought relief from the torment they constantly endured at the hands of three seminaked black children known as the Imps. After consulting with Dr. Monk and his team of wise monkeys, the animals would then be endowed with some new physical feature they could use to defeat their aggressors. Each episode’s plot was hinted at in its title—“How the Alligator Got His Big Mouth” or “How the Quillypig Got His Quills.” Even though the strip’s title mentioned a character named Felix Fiddle, he rarely had much to do with anything, making appearances as a bearded old man who just stands off to the side watching all the action while clutching a cane and briefcase.
In 1903, McCay received a letter from the New York Herald, which was interested in hiring him. It was a big move, off to a much larger city and market. “What do you think I ought to do?” he asked his boss at the Enquirer.
“Wire ’em and tell ’em if they’ll send you a check for traveling expenses you’ll take their offer,” his boss said. With that, McCay and his family took a train east, the small towns drifting by their window until the skyscrapers of New York eventually appeared on the horizon.
In the era before television and radio, newspapers were the main form of mass communication, and their cartoon sections were especially popular. Because a well-liked cartoon could help greatly increase a paper’s circulation, top newspaper cartoonists found themselves part of a well-paid media elite—Winsor McCay’s starting salary at the New York Herald was $60 a week at a time when the average American made $9. Newspaper moguls of the day—including William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and James Gordon Bennett Jr.—regularly launched bidding wars for good cartoonists, driving their salaries into the stratosphere. By the time Hearst hired McCay away from Bennett’s Herald, in 1911, Winsor was making $50,000 a year—a princely sum. He could afford chauffeured cars, multiple homes with dark wood paneling, and custom suits in brave colors like white and fawn.
The same year that McCay started at the New York Herald, he made his first animated cartoon—not because he needed extra money, but because he was seeking an artistic challenge. It all began one day while McCay was sitting at his desk, listening to his colleagues joke about how prolific an artist he was. It was a reputation Winsor was proud of; he liked telling people about how he had once received a box of chalk for his fifth birthday and used it to leave drawings all over his hometown like some sort of doodling Johnny Appleseed. “I drew on fences, blackboards in school, old scraps of paper, slates, sides of barns,” he recalled. “I just couldn’t stop.” The habit lasted into his adult years, and now his colleagues were teasing him for it. As McCay liked to tell the story, this is when his good friend George McManus, creator of the comic strip Bringing Up Father (also known as Jiggs and Maggie), challenged Winsor to churn out several thousand drawings, photograph them quickly in sequence, and then show the result in theaters as a moving picture.
McCay accepted the challenge and decided to animate characters from his own popular comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland, which he had created for his former employer but still held the rights to. The strip had first appeared in 1905, six years after Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, which had helped launch a popular obsession with the psychology of the subconscious. Once people read the book, they couldn’t stop talking about their dreams and the notion that ideas and feelings might exist in a realm somewhere between magic and reality. McCay explored similar territory in his comic strip, playing with the familiar tropes of dreamscapes: falling through space, drowning, moving slowly while everything else around you moves quickly. Each week, his characters floated around outer space on milkweed seeds, on beds that acted as flying carpets, or in ivory coaches pulled by cream-colored rabbits. These fantasies were always rudely interrupted by reality—falling off the flying bed and waking up in a real bed, or being jolted awake by a voice telling you it was all just a dream. Adults enjoyed Little Nemo in Slumberland because it helped them reconnect to their childhood minds; for youngsters, it was a bridge to their blossoming adult minds. The strip was so popular it was adapted for the stage in 1908, costing more than any other production of its era—nearly $300,000—and featured the biggest names known in theater. The production was a critical success and popular with audiences, but made little profit because of its extravagant cost.
Little Nemo in Slumberland was a highly personal cartoon for McCay. He claimed the title character was based on his young son, Robert, even though the name Nemo in Latin technically means “no one.” The character also demonstrated qualities Winsor had as a boy growing up in Spring Lake, Michigan, a logging town where literacy didn’t extend much past McGuffey’s Third Reader, and most people hadn’t understood McCay’s dream of drawing as a career. It was a place where someone like Winsor—small, pale, destined to go bald early—inevitably adopted introverted hobbies like drawing. Just as young Winsor had done, Little Nemo attempted to escape the real world by hiding in his dreams.
The tools McCay used to animate his cartoon were simple: stacks of rice paper, a bottle of Higgins India ink, a stack of Gillott #290 pens, and some art gum. Puffing his way through endless cigarettes, a machine belching out exhaust, he set to the task of producing 4,000 drawings, all a little different from each other. In one, he would establish a pose; in the next, he would move it ever so slightly. Flipping through the drawings quickly gave the suggestion of movement. Each drawing was assigned a serial number and was given marks to keep it in register with the other drawings. Then the drawings were photographed, with the marks kept in careful position to ensure the final image didn’t vibrate on the screen.
McCay