Little Sammy Sneeze

Little Sammy Sneeze was a comic strip by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. In each episode the titular Sammy sneezed himself into an awkward or disastrous predicament. The strip ran from July 24, 1904, until December 9, 1906, in the New York Herald, where McCay was on the staff. It was McCay's first successful comic strip; he followed it with Dream of the Rarebit Fiend later in 1904, and his best-known strip Little Nemo in 1905.

Overview
The strip followed a simple concept: each week, little Sammy would sneeze (with the onomatopoeia "Chow!"), and his powerful sneeze would wreak havoc with his surroundings. His sneeze would build up until its release in the second-to-last panel, and in the last panel he would suffer the consequences—for instance, being driven away by one of his victims. His sneeze was powerful enough that it could even destroy the strip's panel borders.

Though the story of a mischievous boy and the trouble he caused was typical of the comic strips of the day, the artwork displayed an attention to detail McCay was known for. The backgrounds would remain the same from panel to panel, while passersby would unwittingly pass Sammy during his buildup. McCay took the visual ideas he experimented with in Little Sammy Sneeze and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (also 1904) and more fully explored them when he began Little Nemo in Slumberland the following year.

Style
Though not to the degree McCay applied to Little Nemo, McCay's backgrounds were heavily detailed, and he drew monotonous, repetitive images with great accuracy. McCay later applied these skills to his animation work. Sammy was inarticulate, making little more than mouth noises; the adults around him conversed, but in a monotonous manner that did not invite careful reading.

Publishing history


Little Sammy Sneeze' began on 24 July, 1904, in the New York Herald, where McCay had joined the staff in 1903. It ran in color until partway through 1905, and came to an end 9 December, 1906. The Herald took advantage of the popularity of the strip by releasing a 72-page book collection in 1905.

Sunday Press Books released a deluxe 11 × landscape-format hardcover volume called Little Sammy Sneeze: The Complete Color Sunday Comics 1904-1905 in 2007. On the reverse of each Sammy Sneeze page was printed a non-Sammy Sneeze strip—the complete run of McCay's The Story of Hungry Henrietta, as well as selections from John Prentiss Benson's The Woozlebeasts, and Gustave Verbeek's The Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo and The Terrors of the Tiny Tads. These bonus strips appeared in monochrome to Sammy Sneeze's color, as they would have at the time when newspapers normally printed color on only one side of the page.

Legacy
After a two-and-a-half-year run, McCay dropped the strip, while continuing to work on Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, Pilgrim's Progress, and his best-known work, Little Nemo. The strip's concept was later picked up by the creators of characters like Sneezly Seal and Li'l Sneezer.

Thierry Smolderen saw the monotony of Sammy Sneeze as an attempt by McCay at parody that "chuckles at the absurdity of ... doing the same thing ad nauseam”. Noah Berlatsky objected to the idea, calling the strip "excessive and infantile, linked, not to a sense of irony, but a sense of wonder", which he compared to the "eternal appetite of infancy" G. K. Chesterton attributed to the Christian God in Orthodoxy (1908).