Dream of the Rarebit Fiend

Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was a newspaper comic strip by American cartoonist Winsor McCay which began September 10, 1904. As in McCay's signature strip, Little Nemo, the strip was made up of bizarre dreams. It was McCay's second successful strip, after Little Sammy Sneeze secured him a position on the cartoon staff of the New York Herald. Rarebit Fiend was printed in the Evening Telegram, a newspaper published by the Herald. For contractual reasons, McCay signed the strip with the pen name "Silas".

The strip had no continuity or recurring characters. Instead, it had a recurring theme: a character would have a nightmare or other bizarre dream, usually after eating a Welsh rarebit (a cheese-on-toast dish). The character would awaken from the dream in the last panel, regretting having eaten the rarebit. The dreams often revealed the darker sides of the dreamers' psyches—their phobias, hypocrisies, discomforts, and dark fantasies. This was in great contrast to the colorful, childlike fantasy dreams in Little Nemo. The strip is mostly recognized as an adult-oriented precursor to Nemo.

The popularity of Rarebit Fiend and Nemo led to McCay being hired for William Randolph Hearst's chain of newspapers with a star's salary. His editor there thought his highly skilled cartooning was "serious, not funny", and he was made to give up comic strips to do editorial cartooning. The strip was revived 1923–1925 as Rarebit Reveries, though few examples have survived.

Rarebit Fiend was the inspiration for a number of films, including Edwin S. Porter's live-action Dream of a Rarebit Fiend in 1906, and four pioneering animated films by McCay himself: How a Mosquito Operates in 1912, and 1921's Bug Vaudeville, The Pet and The Flying House. The strip is said to have anticipated a number of recurring ideas in popular culture, such as giant characters damaging cities (as later popularized by King Kong and Godzilla).

Overview


Winsor McCay first produced the hallucinogenic Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in 1904, a year before his dream romps of Little Nemo and a full generation before the Surrealist movement unleashed their subconscious on the public. The strip had no recurring characters, but followed one theme: after eating a Welsh rarebit, the day's protagonist would be subject to the darker side of his or her psyche. Typically, the strip would begin with an absurd situation, which would progressively become more absurd until the Fiend—the dreamer—awakened in the final panel. Some situations were merely silly: elephants falling from the ceiling, or two ladies' mink coats having a fight. Other times, they could be more disturbing: characters would find themselves dismembered, another buried alive from a first-person perspective or a child's mother being planted and becoming a tree. In some strips, the Fiend was a spectator, watching fantastic or horrible things happen to someone close to themselves. The typically bourgeois, urban protagonists were often subjected to fears related to public humiliation or loss of social esteem or respectability.

Rarebit Fiend was the only of McCay's strips in which he took on social or political topics, or dealt with contemporary life. He addressed religious leaders, alcoholism, homelessness, political speeches, suicide, fashion, and other topics, unlike his other strips which had fantasy or seemingly vague, timeless backgrounds. The strip had a number of references to contemporary events, such as the 1904 election of Theodore Roosevelt; the recently built Flatiron Building (1902) and St. Regis Hotel (1904) in New York City; and the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War.



The rarebit, a dish typically made with rich cheese thinned with ale, and served melted on toast with cayenne and mustard mixed in, was used despite its innocuousness—according to cultural theorist Scott Bukatman, it was not the sort of dish one would associate with having nightmares. On two occasions other mind-altering substances may have caused the dreams: wood alcohol on October 21, 1904, and opium on August 19, 1905.

McCay's most famous character, Little Nemo, was first prefigured in the first year of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, on December 10, 1904. In 1905, McCay would have the character appear in his own strip in the New York Herald. In comparison to that better-known strip, the Rarebit Fiend strips had minimal backgrounds, and were usually done from a fixed perspective, with the main characters often in a fixed position. The content of Rarebit Fiend played a much bigger role than it did in Little Nemo, whose focus was on beautiful visuals. The stories were self-contained, whereas the Nemo story continued from week to week. The dreams in Nemo were aimed at children, but Rarebit Fiend had more adult-oriented subjects—social embarrassment, fear of dying or going insane, and so on—although some of the dreams in both strips were wish-fulfillment fantasies.

Unlike most comic strips at the time, Rarebit Fiend was not humorous or escapist. The strips highlighted readers' darker selves—hypocrisies, deceitfulness, phobias and discomfort. The strip offered often biting social commentary, and marital, money and religious matters are shown in a negative light. McCay was interested in pushing formal boundaries, and playful self-referentiality played a role in many of the strips, with characters sometimes referring to McCay's alter-ego "Silas", or to the reader. Though frequent in Rarebit Fiend, this self-referentiality does not appear in McCay's other strips.

In contrast to the skilled artwork, the lettering in the dialogue balloons, like in McCay's other work, was awkward and could approach illegibility, especially in reproductions, where the artwork was normally greatly reduced in size. McCay seemed to show little regard for the dialogue balloons, their content, and their placement in the visual composition. They tended to contain repetitive monologues expressing the increasing distress of the speakers, and showed that McCay's gift was in the visual and not the verbal.

Background


McCay had begun cartooning in the 1890s and had a prolific output published in magazines and newspapers. He became known for his ability to draw quickly, a talent he often employed during chalk talks on the vaudeville stage (alongside the likes of Harry Houdini and W. C. Fields). Prior to Dream of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo, McCay had shown an interest the topic of dreams. Some of his earlier work, numbering at least 10 regular comics, had titles such as Daydreams and It Was Only a Dream. McCay's were not the first dream-themed comic strips to be published. McCay's employer, the New York Herald, had printed at least three such strips, beginning with Charles Reese's Drowsy Dick in 1902. Psychoanalysis and dream interpretation had begun to enter the public consciousness with the 1900 publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.

McCay first proposed a strip in which a tobacco fiend finds himself at the North Pole, unable to secure a cigarette and a light. In the last panel the fiend awakens to find it a dream. The Herald asked him to make the cartoon into a series, but with a Welsh rarebit theme instead of tobacco, and McCay complied. The strip was published in a Herald subsidiary, the Evening Telegram, and the Herald's editor required McCay to use a pseudonym for the strip work to keep it separate from his other work. McCay signed Rarebit Fiend strips as "Silas", borrowing the name of a neighbourhood garbage cart driver. After switching to William Randolph Hearst's New York American newspaper in 1911, McCay dropped the "Silas" pseudonym and signed his work in his own name.

McCay married in 1891, and the marriage was not a happy one. According to McCay biographer John Canemaker, marriage is depicted in Rarebit Fiend as "a minefield of hypocrisy, jealousy, and misunderstanding". McCay was a short man, barely five feet (5 ft) tall. He was dominated by his wife, who stood as tall as he was. Images of small, shy men dominated by their taller or fatter wives appeared frequently in Rarebit Fiend. Gigantism, with characters being overwhelmed by rapidly growing elements, was another recurring motif, perhaps as compensation on McCay's part for a sense of smallness. McCay's brother, Arthur, had been put away in a mental asylum, which may have inspired the themes of insanity which are common in the strip.



Despite the bleak view in the strip, McCay's work was so popular that he was hired by William Randolph Hearst in 1911 with a star's salary. His work was deemed by editor Arthur Brisbane to be "serious, not funny", and he was made to give up his comic strips (including Rarebit Fiend and Nemo) to work full-time illustrating editorials.

Influences


Scholars such as Claude Moliterni, Ulrich Merkl, Alfredo Castelli and others have hunted down what they believe to have influenced McCay's work on Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. Amongst the possible influences are Edward Lear's popular The Book of Nonsense (1870), Gelett Burgess' The Burgess Nonsense Book (1901), Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (particularly the pool of tears scene, which seems related to the flood of sweat in one early Rarebit Fiend strip), and a variety of dream cartoons and illustrations that appeared in various periodicals with which McCay was likely familiar.

What was the most probable immediate influence on the strip was Welsh Rarebit Tales (1902) by Harle Oren Cummins. This collection of 15 science fiction stories were inspired, according to Cummins, by nightmares brought on by eating Welsh Rarebit and lobster—making further likely the influence, as several post-Herald strips from 1911 and 1912 were titled Dream of a Lobster Fiend.

Other influences which have been established include H. G. Wells, L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1902), Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and the Engineer's Thumb (1889), Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis (1896), Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Mark Twain's The 1,000,000 Pound Bank-Note (1893).

McCay never acknowledged the influence of Sigmund Freud, whose The Interpretation of Dreams had been published in 1900. According to McCay scholar Ulrich Merkl, however, it is likely he was aware of the Viennese doctor's theories, as they had been widely reported and talked about in the New York newspaper world of which McCay was a part.

Publishing history


Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was McCay's longest running comic strip. McCay made more than 300 more Rarebit Fiend episodes than he made of the more famous Little Nemo. The first strip appeared on September 10, 1904, in the New York Herald, a few months after the first appearance of McCay's Little Sammy Sneeze. It was McCay's second successful newspaper strip, after Sammy Sneeze landed him a position on the cartooning staff of the Herald. Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was printed in the Evening Telegram, which was published by the Herald at the time.

The strip appeared two to three times a week. It typically filled up a quarter of a newspaper page on weekdays, and half a page on Saturdays. The strip normally appeared in black-and-white, but 29 of the strips appeared in color throughout 1913, run weekly in the Herald. These were strips drawn between 1908 and 1911 which the Evening Telegram had neglected to print. McCay sometimes encouraged readers to submit dream ideas, to be sent care of the Herald to "Silas the Dreamer" McCay acknowledged the submissions he accepted with a "thanks to..." on the strip beside his own signature. Amongst those credited were science fiction pioneer Hugo Gernsback.

Dream of the Rarebit Fiend ran until 1911. It was revived in various papers between 1911 and 1913 under other titles, such as Midsummer Day Dreams and It Was Only a Dream. From 1923 to 1925, the strip was revived under the title Rarebit Reveries. Though signed "Robert Winsor McCay Jr." (McCay's son), the strips appear to be in McCay's own hand, with the possible exception of the lettering. McCay had also signed his son's name to some of his animation and editorial cartoons. Only seven examples of Rarebit Reveries are known, though it is nearly certain others were printed.

Collections


The earliest collection, under the title Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, appeared in 1905 from Frederick A. Stokes, reprinting 61 of the strips. This collection was reprinted in 1973 in a 10% enlarged edition by Dover Publications, with new introductory material. The Dover edition dropped the final strip from the original collection, however, as it contained ethnic humor that the publisher believed would not be to the taste of a 1970s audience.

Rarebit Fiend examples can be found in Daydreams and Nightmares (Fantagraphics, 1988/2006; editor Richard Marschall), a collection of miscellaneous work by McCay. Checker Books published the series Winsor McCay: Early Works, which reprinted many of the Rarebit Fiend strips over eight volumes. Checker released Dream of the Rarebit Fiend: The Saturdays (ISBN 978-1-933-16065-8) in 2006 which reprinted 183 of the color Saturday strips. The Checker books reprinted all but about 300 of the known Rarebit Fiend strips.

In July 2007, German art historian Ulrich Merkl self-published a 43.5 ×, 464-page volume called Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, reproducing 369 of the strips in full size. Previous reprintings of the strip reduced the strips to about a third of their originally published size, resulting in loss of detail and making the lettering hard to read. The size of the book made automatic binding impossible, so it had to be bound by hand. The book was limited to 1000 copies, and a DVD was included with scans of the 821 known installments of the strip, the complete text of the book, a catalogue raisonné of the strips, and a video of an example of McCay's animation. The sources of the strips were from both Merkl's personal collection, the Cartoon Research Library of the Ohio State University, and microfilms purchased from the New York Public Library containing the complete New York Evening Journal run of the strip. Merkl has said that, on average, six hours were required per strip for scanning and restoration. The book also featured two essays by Italian comics editor Alfredo Castelli and one by Jeremey Taylor, former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.

Other media
McCay's work was very popular. It was adapted to film by McCay and others, and was optioned for Broadway. A "comic opera or musical extravanganza" called Dream of the Welsh Rarebit Fiend went unproduced, though McCay had signed a contract to collaborate on it with music by Max Hirschfeld and lyrics by George Henry Payne and Robert Gilbert Welch.

Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906)


Film pioneer Edwin S. Porter produced a seven-minute live-action film adaptation called The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend in 1906 for the Edison Company. The Fiend was played by John P. Brawn, who was tormented by imps in his bed, which flew through the air, eventually leaving him hanging from a steeple (a scene similar to that of one of the early strips). The story was based on a Rarebit Fiend strip that ran on 28 January 1905.

Animation by McCay
McCay produced four hand-drawn animated films based upon his Rarebit Fiend series:

How a Mosquito Operates (1912)


Put together in December 1911, and released in 1912, McCay's second film (also known as The Story of a Mosquito) is one of the earliest examples of line-drawn animation. A giant mosquito with a top hat flies in through a window to feed on a man in bed, who tries in vain to defend himself. The mosquito drinks itself so full that it explodes. Rather than expanding like a balloon, the mosquito fills up in a naturalistic fashion according to its body structure. The idea for the film was taken from a 1909 Rarebit Fiend strip. McCay biographer John Canemaker commends McCay for his ability to imbue the mosquito with character and a personality.

Bug Vaudeville (1921)


Bug Vaudeville is a 1921 fantasy in which a tramp comes out from a group of meticulously drawn trees, announcing he is sleepy. He falls asleep after saying, "[C]heese cakes are bad", as they give him strange dreams. Against the backdrop, a series of bugs put on performance after performance, against highly detailed and realistic backgrounds. The performance comes to an end when a spider grabs the silhouetted member of the audience (who had been visible throughout the performance) and eats him whole. The film is presented as a vaudeville show, though it does not make use of the human–animation stage interaction that McCay used with Gertie the Dinosaur.

The film draws from McCay's own experiences in the circus and vaudeville worlds. Film critic Andrew Sarris praised Bug Vaudeville as his favorite of McCay's films for "the linear expressiveness of the drawings and the intuitive rhythm of the acts". "A Fellini", he wrote, "would be honored by such insight into the ritual of performance".

The Pet (1921)


Inspired by a Rarebit Fiend strip from March 8, 1905, The Pet depicts a couple who adopt a mysterious animal with an insatiable appetite. It consumes its milk, the house cat, the house's furnishings, rat poison, and passing vehicles, including airplanes and a blimp, while growing larger and larger. As it makes wanders among the skyscrapers of the city a swarm of airplanes and zeppelins gather to bomb the beast.

The dark 1921 film was the last over which McCay had "total creative control", according to McCay biographer John Canemaker. Stephen R. Bissette called film "the first-ever 'giant monster attacking a city' motion picture ever made".

The Flying House (1921)


Against the backdrop of the rapidly urbanizing United States of the 1910s and 1920s, one house from the artificial grid of modern, planned America takes flight in the dream of a woman who has feasted on Welsh rarebit. The Flying House is rendered in the meticulous realistic detail for which McCay was famous. The house is conventional in every respect—until the viewer reaches the attic, where the woman's husband is seen tending an enormous engine. He attaches a propeller to a shaft out front of the house, and tells his wife that his actions are in reaction to their landlord's intention to evict them over nonpayment. He plans to "steal the house", and they fly away to find a place where their landlord will never find them—a swamp, the ocean, even the moon, where they are chased off by the Man in the Moon with a flyswatter. The film self-consciously directs the viewers to notice the quality and accuracy of the animation when the house takes off into space, calling attention to the "remarkable piece of animation which follows", accurately showing the revolutions of the Earth and Moon and the "beautiful constellation of Orion". The woman becomes anxious that they will become "lost in the sky". In the end, the house is struck by a military rocket, bringing the nightmare to an end with the woman awakening in her bed.

The film was released in 1921, and was credited to McCay's son Robert, though Canemaker states it is unlikely the elder McCay was not involved. A 1921 New York Times review found the film "interesting because of its excellent workmanship and fantastic character" though it was "not as brightly humorous" as it could be. Film critic Richard Eder contrasted the film's realistic nightmarishness with the more innocent qualities that came to be associated with American cartoons. In 2011, animator Bill Plympton restored the film, using Kickstarter to fund the project. The film was colorized, and actors Matthew Modine and Patricia Clarkson provided voices.

Music
The Edison Military Band performed a piece called "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend" on an Edison cylinder (Edison 9585) in 1907, written by Thomas W. Thurban. The piece was likely inspired by Porter's 1906 film, and may have been intended to accompany it. The piece was written for 18–20-piece band, and has been recorded numerous times.



Legacy


Rarebit Fiend set up a formula which McCay would more famously put to use in Little Nemo. A large number of the Nemo strips used ideas recycled from Rarebit Fiend, such as the October 31, 1907, "walking bed" episode, which was used in the July 26, 1908, episode of Little Nemo.

Comics scholar Jeet Heer called Rarebit Fiend "perhaps the most bizarre newspaper feature in American history". According to Merkl, it has presaged ideas and scenes in the media. There are scenes in Rarebit Fiend in which a man kicks a dog, slaps a woman, beats a blind man, and throws another woman out a window, as in Luis Buñuel's L'Age d'Or (1930); giant characters let loose in the big city, climbing and damaging buildings and subway trains, as in King Kong (1933); elevators flying from buildings and other scenes as in the 2005 Tim Burton take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory although Tim Burton did not invent the scene as it featured in scenes in Dumbo (1941), Mary Poppins (1964), and others. The strip for March 9, 1907, in which a child's bedroom becomes a lion-infested jungle, anticipated the 1950 Ray Bradbury story "The Veldt", and the strip from September 26, 1908, which depicted a stretchable face, anticipated Salvador Dalí's surrealist painting "Soft self portrait with fried bacon" (1941), and the cosmetic surgeries in Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

The strip was most likely an influence on episodes of Frank King's early comic strip Bobby Make-Believe. Many scholars believe that Carl Barks, a professed fan of Little Nemo, was likely exposed to Rarebit Fiend, which appeared in The San Francisco Examiner, which Barks read growing up. Several episodes of Barks' Donald Duck stories appear to have taken their subjects from Rarebit Fiend. Many scenes from animated films by Tex Avery from between 1943 and 1954 are said to show clearly a Rarebit Fiend influence. Science fiction illustrator Frank R. Paul painted a number of pulp magazine covers influenced by Rarebit Fiend.

Art Spiegelman paid parodic homage to Rarebit Fiend in his 1974 strip "Real Dream". In 1991, Rick Veitch began producing short comics based on his dreams. Beginning in 1994, he put out 21 issues of Roarin' Rick's Rare Bit Fiends from his own King Hell Press.

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