Name: Daydreams and Nightmares
ISBN: 9781560975694

Winsor McCay

Daydreams & Nightmares collects the rarest work from Little Nemo In Slumberland creator Winsor McCay's historic career. A fantasist of the first rank, McCay was a key pioneer in the histories of both comics and animation. He had a fascination with dreams that extended beyond his newspaper strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, and it was a fascination as compelling as that of Freud, Jung and Adler's, as proven in the pages of Daydreams & Nightmares. McCay's dream-inspired strips, illustrations and cartoons feature rarebit-induced nightmares, playful "what-ifs," moralistic panoramas, pictorial allegories and other fantastic visions.

The Fantastic Visions of Winsor McCay 1898–1934

Daydreams and Nightmares

Gavin

Incoherent, didactic, and yet astounding. So no insult to call McCay the Dril of political cartoons. (Apparently he was the creator of the single panel as we know it? What a terrible legacy!)

Many of these would be great capital-a Art if he only hadn't plastered "TRUTH" or "DRUG HABIT" or "SLAVERY" all over the clear symbols he was using for those things. But this absolute sincerity is part of the power, for all that leaden hearts like mine cringe at it. Hallucinatory moral clarity.

It's incoherent because he has a lot of standard booster capitalist views (like envy [of the rich] as the worst of all vices and Captain of Industry glory) and a lot of standard Christian socialist views (like wealth costing you your soul, like advertising and entertainment as evil rather than silly). There are a couple of slightly unnerving evangelical rapture panels. You could explain this by him just playing up to his current clients' ideology, cynically. But I hope he contained all of this nonsense. 

But ignore all that: he gets it. He gets what human history was like, and what the filthy and nasty urban industrial accumulation is 
  for
. All writing is an entry in the Great Conversation, and all actual work (not rent-seeking) is part of the great project. One of his running motifs is the farmer bent cropping as an inset. Most of my contemporaries don't get it like McCay gets it, even though it's fucking obvious, as it was not in 1910. 

He's also surprisingly metal. Again, his moral and political feelings are so strong that they produce a presentiment of metal's extremes. Actually I think this extremity, this early, is the most impressive part. For all that it had to be cloaked in pieties and Hearst editorialising.

I've been reading comics all year and McCay is one of only a couple of artists who make me stop in my tracks, who force their whole mind onto the page.

Daydreams and Nightmares The Fantastic Visions of Winsor McCay 1898–1934

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