Before his remarkable Litttle Nemo in Slumberland, McCay created two strips starring young children. Today, Winsor McCay (1867-1934) is universally acknowledged as the first master of both the comic strip and the animated cartoon. Although invented by others, both genres were developed into enduring popular art of the highest imagination through McCay's innovative genius. From the publishers of the widely-acclaimed deluxe reprint Little Nemo In Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays , this book features all of the Little Sammy Sneeze color pages (1904-05) plus Hungry Henrietta, McCay's other comic, which appeared on the back of Sammy in the Sunday New York Herald. The unique style of this book presents two other flipside comics of 1904: The Woozlebeasts and The Upside Downs, along with the complete 27-chapter saga of Hungry Henrietta. All comics are digitally restored in the original size and colors.

"Mit dose kids, society is nix!" So said the Inspector about the Katzenjammer kids, but he could have been speaking of all comic strips in their formative years at the turn of the last century. From the very first color Sunday supplement, comics were a driving force in newspaper sales, even though their crude and often offensive content placed them in a whirl of controversy. Sunday comics presented a wild parody of the world and the culture that surrounded them. Society didn't stand a chance. These are the origins of the American comic strip, born at a time when there were no set styles or formats, when artistic anarchy helped spawn a new medium. Here are the earliest offerings from known greats like R. F. Outcault, George McManus, Winsor McCay, and George Herriman, along with the creations of more than fifty other superb cartoonists; over 150 Sunday comics dating from 1895 to 1915.

"This is the fourth volume in the Checker Book Publishing's series reprinting of the cartoons and illustrations of Winsor McCay. The majority of McCay's works published in these volumes are seeing print for the first time since their original publication in the early 1900s. Best known for "Little Nemo in Slumberland," this volume features McCay's other popular but less well known works, such as the 1908 strips of "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend," and "A Pilgrim's Progress," An assortment of McCay's editorial cartoons, meticulously drawn and bitingly funny, are also included in this volume. McCay's unique, artistic approach to the comic strip medium, combined so successfully with his unconventional themes and social satire, earned him both public and critical acclaim during his career and a lasting influence upon future generations of illustrators, cartoonists, and animators."--back cover.

In Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond describes how popular early American cartoon characters were derived from blackface minstrelsy. He charts the industrialization of animation in the early twentieth century, its representation in the cartoons themselves, and how important blackface minstrels were to that performance, standing in for the frustrations of animation workers. Cherished cartoon characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, were conceived and developed using blackface minstrelsy's visual and performative conventions: these characters are not like minstrels; they are minstrels. They play out the social, cultural, political, and racial anxieties and desires that link race to the laboring body, just as live minstrel show performers did. Carefully examining how early animation helped to naturalize virulent racial formations, Sammond explores how cartoons used laughter and sentimentality to make those stereotypes seem not only less cruel, but actually pleasurable. Although the visible links between cartoon characters and the minstrel stage faded long ago, Sammond shows how important those links are to thinking about animation then and now, and about how cartoons continue to help to illuminate the central place of race in American cultural and social life.

"This book is the first definitive collection of McCay's earliest accomplishments in newspaper cartooning, containing Dream of The Rarebit Fiend, Tales of the Jungle Imps, Little Sammy Sneeze, and A Pilgrim's Progress. The four series that are included in Early Works showcase McCay's sophisticated artwork and storytelling styles. Jungle Imps is the only collection that was not written by McCay. It was originally published in the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1903, and the Sunday editor of the Enquirer, George Randolph Chester, wrote the stories in verse, which McCay then illustrated. Jungle Imps married McCay's first foray into the world of the newspaper comic strip, to be followed by Little Sammy Sneeze in 1904 and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in 1905, both of which are also collected here. McCay's unique manipulation of the comic art form, with bird's eye views and unusual perspectives, combined with his unorthodox subject matter, were responsible for the extreme popularity of his work during his lifetime as well as its enduring appeal ad influence on emerging generations of cartoonists."--back cover.

In The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, Thierry Smolderen presents a cultural landscape whose narrative differs in many ways from those presented by other historians of the comic strip. Rather than beginning his inquiry with the popularly accepted "sequential art" definition of the comic strip, Smolderen instead wishes to engage with the historical dimensions that inform that definition. His goal is to understand the processes that led to the twentieth-century comic strip, the highly recognizable species of picture stories that he sees crystallizing around 1900 in the United States. Featuring close readings of the picture stories, caricatures, and humoristic illustrations of William Hogarth, Rodolphe Töpffer, Gustave Doré, and their many contemporaries, Smolderen establishes how these artists were immersed in a very old visual culture in which images—satirical images in particular—were deciphered in a way that was often described as hieroglyphical. Across eight chapters, he acutely points out how the effect of the printing press and the mass advent of audiovisual technologies (photography, audio recording, and cinema) at the end of the nineteenth century led to a new twentieth-century visual culture. In tracing this evolution, Smolderen distinguishes himself from other comics historians by following a methodology that explains the present state of the form of comics on the basis of its history, rather than presenting the history of the form on the basis of its present state. This study remaps the history of this influential art form.