#Illustrator and easy cut studio series#

Though a film of only a few minutes required thousands of drawings, McCay didn’t flag, and in fact, he saw his work as the wave of the future. McCay was meticulous in his process, hand-drawing each frame of his shorts and timing them precisely to sixteen frames a second, writes Canemaker. Dressed as a circus animal trainer, he would gesture with his whip to the glowing screen behind him and shout commands, in response to which Gertie would lift one leg and then the other, and then chomp down a shiny red apple. Between 19 he produced ten animated films his third was the famous Gertie the Dinosaur, with which he would interact live on the vaudeville stage. Not content to keep his contributions to static media and eager to enhance the vaudeville shows that he put on as a side hobby, he started to work on animated short films. And yet, ever since the medium was codified initially in the late nineteenth century, artists have used the unyielding format of the funny papers as a challenge rather than a limitation.

The gridded, linear panels of a newspaper comic strip appear to be, on initial consideration, an unlikely place for a hotbed of aesthetic innovation and disarming points of view to develop. In the words of art historian Katherine Roeder, Moreover, as media started to think of itself in increasingly dynamic fashion, comics too started to play with the idea of physical and mental space. In this sort of environment, with the benefit of reach and budget, comics could be self-acknowledged ephemera, exist in a commercial medium, and still regard themselves as serious art. Fell, “color insured strip cartoons their ‘readers.’” “As movement was the element which drew Nickelodeon audiences to the feats of the Lumieres, Edison and Melies,” writes John L. As a result, early animators acquired a mass market-and a certain cachet: with presses rolling off color Sunday editions, magnates like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst used cartoonists as star players to draw readership. As media scholar Conrad Smith points out, from 1870 to 1900, daily news circulation rose from 2.6 million to 15 million copies. The early years of the twentieth century were a boom time for the newspaper industry. Little Nemo comic strip by Winsor McCay, Septemvia Wikimedia Commons Quite often the dreams…were attributed to eating something before bedtime, helping to base the fantasy in the logic of reality. The objects were bigger than life, the characters deviants from reality, or the environments fantastic. Each full-page story ended with Nemo suddenly waking up in his own bed, begging the reader to consider what might be real and what might be a dream.

#Illustrator and easy cut studio series#

In 1905, after working on a handful of comic properties, he debuted what would become his signature strip, a sprawling full-page color adventure called “ Little Nemo in Slumberland.” The series was an elegant fantasy in which the young title character, whose name means “no one,” is drawn from his bedroom into boisterous adventures in Slumberland, where walking beds, Godzilla-sized turkeys, and races through the stars were common fare. In McCay, it was a combination of expansive imagination, multi-disciplinary eccentricity, and restless work ethic that set him apart.

This alone wouldn’t have been an unusual origin story for an a young artist in a vibrant time for American print media-George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat, also came up from working-class roots to find opportunity in the newspaper industry, and Robert Ripley, of Believe or Not fame, was a high school drop-out who started out as a sports cartoonist.Įach full-page story ended with Nemo suddenly waking up in his own bed, begging the reader to consider what might be real and what might be a dream. He parlayed his talent into a steady cartooning gig at the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune as a teenager. McCay, the “son of a Michigan lumberman,” in the words of biographer John Canemaker, got his start in dime museums and carnival theater, painting posters and advertisements for unusual midway acts. But while Disney was arguably the most influential figure in twentieth-century American culture and a standard-bearer for animation as its popular art form, he wouldn’t have been able to take his place in the public consciousness (nor celebrate 100 years of animated entertainment) without forerunners like the artist Winsor McCay. Early animation is so dominated by the personality and output of Walt Disney that it’s easy to forget that popular illustration existed before Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Steamboat Willie.