Today in pulp I'm looking at a rather splendid Modernist and Surrealist comic strip from 1904: Dream of the Rarebit Fiend! #FridayFeeling
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was written and illustrated by cartoonist Winsor McCay, who was already busy in 1904 illustrating Little Sammy Sneeze for the New York Herald.
Little Sammy Sneeze was already showing McCay's talent for bringing the ideas of Modernism into cartoons. Sammy often ended up breaking the fourth wall or crashing through the panel borders.
In 1904 McCay proposed a new strip for the Herald, one that featured the strange world of dreams and the unconscious. They agreed, but with one proviso...
Rather than featuring a 'tobacco fiend,' as McCay had initially suggested, the protagonist would instead partake of the cheese-heavy toasted snack Welsh Rarebit.
The change may have been influenced by Welsh Rarebit Tales by Harle Oren Cummins, a 1902 anthology of weird stories. Ogden Nash and Lewis Carroll have also been suggested as influences for McCay's work.
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend first appeared in the New York Evening Telegram in September 1904, and new strips were published two or three times a week. McCay's formula for these was always the same...
The panels would expand on a strange dream someone was having, with the oddities or themes of the dream growing and growing until the last panel, when the dreamer would wake and rue the eating of Welsh Rarebit before bed.
The strip was hugely successful and ran until 1911, before being revived in 1923 as Rarebit Reveries. Part of the reason was due to McCay's instinctive understanding of dream logic and symbolism.
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend really does read like a dream, showing us the unconscious manifesting its anxieties through strange symbolism and juxtapositions. It is also a great example of a one page graphic novel.
Winsor McCay is most famous for his other strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland, which wonderfully showcases his love of Modernism and his innovative use of repetition. However Rarebit Fiend is still my favourite, mostly because it's strips are endlessly fascinating.
A short film, Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, was made in 1906 by Edwin S. Porter based on one of McCay's strips. McCay later animated a number of his stories himself.
Many collections of Rarebit Fiend strips have been published over the years and they are well worth seeking out. The stories are fun, strange and elegantly told.
And that's it for my look at Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. Don't let it put you off toasted cheese!
More stories another time...
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