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Chapter 1

“Slumberland”

In 1911, newspaper cartoonist Winsor McCay confidently declared himself to be “the first man in the world to make animated cartoons.” Perhaps he made his claim because he was unaware of the others, or maybe he just meant that he was the first to do it his way. Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Once the words were uttered, controversy erupted and other cartoonists came forward, indignantly declaring their own right to the title. In truth, McCay wasn’t technically the first—multiple people had come up with similar concepts around the same time—but he was the most famous and admired of all the contenders. Thus, to him went the credit and the glory.

Ever since McCay was a boy, people spoke of him the way they spoke of legends. His family claimed he drew his first picture before he said his first word, while people from his hometown shared similar apocryphal stories about his unique artistic gifts. The effect of these stories was to provide a sense of clarity about the vast scope of his talent, and to imbue Winsor with a sense of destiny.

McCay was already famous when he created his first animated cartoon in 1911. By that time, he had revolutionized the newspaper comic strip into something resembling movie storyboards of the future: the illusion of motion, creative perspective, people frozen in action poses. His strips were filled with epic stories, capturing the public’s imagination and making Winsor one of the most widely recognized newspaper cartoonists in the country.

Despite these achievements, McCay was restless, wanting to expand his art further. He was drawn to the new technology behind motion pictures­—­then a burgeoning art form—and couldn’t stop talking to his newspaper colleagues about the movies’ potential. Soon he began dreaming of making his comic strips move in a similar way. He would animate only a handful of cartoons during his lifetime, but they were wildly influential, inspiring many other cartoonists—early greats such as Max Fleischer, Otto Messmer, and Walt Disney—to do something similar.

His influence was profound, but Winsor McCay’s impact on animation was all but forgotten by the time of his death, in 1934. Some two decades later, his name would fade from public memory, even though many of his protégés, such as Walt Disney, would become famous. Disney was generous about celebrating those who had inspired him, however, and decided to produce, in 1955, a short television segment about McCay. Before it aired, Disney invited McCay’s son, Robert, himself now gray at the temples, to come visit his studio in Burbank, California. After a private tour of the grounds, full of sunshine and swaying palms, the two men eventually found themselves standing in Disney’s office, gazing out the window. Warm and casual, Walt gave credit where it was due. “Bob,” he said, sweeping his hand across the gorgeous view of his empire, “all this should have been your father’s.”

Winsor McCay earned his first money from art in the late 1880s, by drawing portraits of people at Sackett & Wiggins’s Wonderland, a dime museum located in Detroit, Michigan. He lived in nearby Ypsilanti and was attending classes at Cleary’s Business College, where his parents had sent him to learn practical skills such as typewriting, shorthand, and simple accounting. But Winsor bristled at the prospect of a life involving practical skills and played hooky so he could go draw portraits instead. He dropped out of school shortly thereafter.

Decades later, memories of Wonderland would resurface in McCay’s animation. The museum was a warren of velvet curtains, red brick, and flickering gas lamps. Dwarfs and bearded ladies roamed the hallways while tattooed men announced upcoming shows: Professor Matthew’s Circus of Performing Goats! or Billy Wells! The man with the iron skull who allows stone and boards to be broken on his head! Wonderland taught Winsor a practical lesson he would use later in his career: always please your audience. “A great many women and girls had me draw their pictures, and even at that age I was wise enough to make all of them beautiful whether they were entitled to it or not,” Winsor said. “I used to leave that place with my pockets bulging with money.”

Young and restless, McCay left Ypsilanti and, after a short stint in Chicago, landed in Cincinnati in 1891. Those who knew him said this was where he found his true voice as an artist—his “heart was always with the Queen City,” his son Robert recalled. The town still possessed some of its glory from the old riverboat days, picturesque yet gritty, an optimistic place that also had an interesting dark side: party bosses, rigged elections, poker games ending with an angry gambler flipping the table over.

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 was known for drawing so efficiently, his colleagues joked, that he could draw a picture in a single line without ever raising his hand from the paper. As he worked, a cigarette always dangled from his lips, the thin plumes of smoke pooling underneath his wide-brimmed hats.

Winsor McCay re-creating the laborious process he used to produce his Little Nemo cartoon, circa 1911.

Fifteen years earlier, McCay had seen his first movie while working at the dime museum in Cincinnati. That film had been part of Thomas Edison’s Vitascope project, when cinema was still very much a novelty. The premise was simple—just a train moving toward the camera—but it frightened those who had never seen a moving film before. During the showing one man stood up, screaming his head off, while another man fainted and crumpled to the ground. In subsequent years, people became comfortable with seeing photographs move on-screen, but they still had never seen drawings like McCay’s move in a similar way.

On April 12, 1911, McCay showed his animated cartoon at New York’s Colonial Theatre, a vaudeville house that seated nearly 1,300 people. The spectators sat mesmerized, asking each other excitedly if it was all some sort of trick using special photography as they watched characters—Impy, Nemo, and Dr. Flip—float in space, no wires visible, as Nemo appeared out of fragments of stray lines that had coalesced to form him. When the cartoon reached its end, just a few minutes after it started, a green dragon named Bosco lumbered into the frame holding a chair in his mouth to carry all the characters away.

Moving Picture World called the cartoon “an admirable piece of work,” and claimed that it “should be popular everywhere.” What the magazine didn’t know, because animation was still brand-new, was that McCay’s film had set a very high bar. Only people looking back, from many years in the future, could appreciate just how high that bar was. In the 1960s, an animator named Bob Kurtz would call McCay’s work “Seventy or eighty years ahead of its time—as if he had really been born in 2025, acquired a complete knowledge of animation, then took a time capsule back to 1911 and faked it.” In 1985, Chuck Jones, who helped create many of the iconic Warner Bros. cartoon characters, would say, “It is as though the first creature to emerge from the primeval slime was Albert Einstein; and the second was an amoeba, because after McCay’s animation, it took his followers nearly twenty years to figure out how he did it.”

After finishing his first cartoon, McCay began dreaming of animation’s vast potential and championing it as a new art form. Perhaps it would even replace great styles of art that had come before, he told anyone who would listen. “Take, for instance, that wonderful painting which everyone is familiar with, entitled The Angelus,” he announced to a crowd of fans one day, referring to a popular oil painting by the French master Jean-François Millet, of two peasants standing in a field solemnly praying over a meager harvest of potatoes. “There will be a time when people will gaze at it and ask why the objects remain rigid and stiff. They will demand action. And to meet this demand the artists of that time will look to motion picture people for help and the artists, working hand in hand with science, will evolve a new school of art that will revolutionize the entire field.”