Career
In 1889, McCay moved to Chicago, intending to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, but due to lack of money had to find employment instead. He worked for the National Printing and Engraving Company, producing woodcuts for circus and theatrical posters. Two years later, he moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and went to work as an artist for Kohl and Middleton's Vine Street Dime museum. While in Cincinnati he married Maude Leonore Dufour. McCay began doing vaudeville chalk talks in 1906.[4] In his The Seven Ages of Man vaudeville act, he drew two faces and progressively aged them.
Little Nemo in Slumberland
McCay's first major comic strip series was A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle with 43 installments published from January to November 1903 in the Cincinnati Enquirer. The strip was based on poems by George Randolph Chester, then a reporter and editor at the Enquirer. The stories concerned jungle creatures and the ways that they adapted to a hostile world, with individual titles such as How the Elephant Got His Trunk and How the Ostrich Got So Tall.
His strips Little Nemo and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, published under the pseudonym "Silas",[6] were both set in the dreams of their characters and featured fantasy art that attempted to capture the look and feel of dreams. McCay's cartoons were never overwhelmingly popular, but always had a strong following because of his expressive graphic style. Newspaper pages were physically much larger in that time and McCay usually had a half a page to work with. For fantasy art in comics, his only rival was Lyonel Feininger, who went on to have a career in the fine arts after his comics days were over.
McCay also created a number of animated short films, in which every single frame of each cartoon (with each film requiring thousands of frames) was hand-drawn by McCay and occasionally his assistants. McCay went on vaudeville tours with his films. He presented lectures and did drawings; then he interacted with his animated films, performing such tricks as holding his hand out to "pet" his animated creations.
Death and legacy
McCay died on July 26, 1934 of a cerebral embolism, and was buried at the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn.
In 1966, Woody Gelman discovered many of the original Little Nemo strips at a cartoon studio where Bob McCay, Winsor's son, had worked. Many of the original drawings that Gelman recovered were displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the direction of curator A. Hyatt Mayor. In 1973, Gelman would publish a collection of Little Nemo strips in Italy.
In 1990, the Japanese video game company Capcom released a video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System entitled Little Nemo: The Dream Master, based on the 1989 Japanese film adaptation of Little Nemo in Slumberland.
In 1994, cartoonist Rick Veitch began a 21 issue comic book entitled Roarin' Rick's Rare Bit Fiends, which included strips based on his dreams. The letters section of the comic book was titled "Little Omens".
The Italian cartoonist and Harvey Award Winner Vittorio Giardino was inspired by McCay and called one of his works, a series of erotic comic strips, Little Ego after Little Nemo.
On October 15th, 2012, Google showed an animated Doodle for the 107th anniversary of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, featuring an interactive, motion picture comic strip.