The cutting-edge cartoons of Winsor McCay

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41 points·benbreen··5 comments

I love Windsor McKay. The Little Nemo strips are excellent.

The entire series is on archive: https://archive.org/details/LittleNemo1905-1914ByWinsorMccay

Also his pioneering work in animation, Gertie the Dinosaur, is worth a watch: https://youtu.be/32pzHWUTcPc

And a shameless plug for a guide to Tibetan dream yoga I made using McKay's illustrations: https://imgur.io/a/lc9x6Yf

The early animation the absolutely blew me away when I saw it was the work of Bob Clampett (and John Coleman) early work for an never-produced John Carter of Mars, done in 1936: https://youtu.be/bTAlgZlqwnQ?t=34

Speaking of Bob Clampett, I think he did a great job introducing surreal quasi-psych cartoons to the masses. Shame he wasn’t a decent workplace politician though.

I ran across a lot of Windsor McKay comics when I was working on my Krazy Kat project[0]. There are a lot of McKay comics just sitting in newspaper archives, waiting to be extracted and put into a webpage where they can be enjoyed.

0: https://joel.franusic.com/krazy_kat/about/

I ended up buying "Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays" which is a large-format bound book with a ton of the original strips. I really like his creativity in breaking out of the frames, and in showing a sequence of events across frames.

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