Winsor McCay: Early Works, Vol. 2

Rating:
Summary: Solid though not perfect series continuation.
Review: This volume opens with a selection of 1906 "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend" strips. I've seen a couple reprinted in other compilations but most I haven't seen. Good all around in terms of distinctive McCay material and the book's reproduction of it.

Then comes a selection of "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend" Saturday strips. These were originally a larger frequently horizontal format so here they are printed sideways to maximize size. Still, unfortunately the much larger size of the originals causes these strips to be printed very small. The daily "Rarebit' strip had 9 to 12 panels. The Saturday strip often has 16 to 24 panels and sometimes more elaborate art. The problem is the book's format is smallish and this results in the text and pictures being in my opinion too small to be easily read or appreciated on a number of the Saturday strips.

"The Story of Hungry Henrietta" inhabits the same comic universe as "Little Sammy Sneeze" The intro says McCay continued the strip for 6 months. Here are 10 presumably in sequence since the intro mentions there is the continuity of the title character growth over the run. This strip I believe was in color and the publishers did a reasonably good job of reproducing it in B&W.

"This is a Baseball Town" isn't a strip but a section collecting single panel spot humorous illustrations of the 1903 Cincinnati Reds. Some are studied careful illustrations while others are quick sketches that were published. Fun, properly reproduced and very rare. I wonder though if these went with an article or were freestanding. The context isn't clear though the good humor is.

(Cincinnati) "Enquirer Editorial Art". This is by far the largest portion of the book. Here we have spot illustrations - so this turns out to be something quite different from the humorous Baseball pieces and aren't to be confused with the (collected in other books) usually allegorical illustrations he did to illuminate Hearst's editorials some years later. Maybe the articles or editorials these go along with are very boring and arcane. I don't see how some of these could be editorials, they seem more like article spot illustrations. Standing alone it's hard to determine the viewpoint of most of these without further annotation. Printed are caricatures of once identifiable people now completely unknown (if they don't happen to be Teddy Roosevelt or J. P. Morgan). The African American caricatures might be troubling even in context, but here we don't know if there is further justification because no context is reprinted. None the less here is another collection of illustrations that have not been available before.

Finally the publisher's description tells me there is a final chapter of animation stills from his unfinished animation "The Centaurs". Unfortunately I can't comment on it since I was unwittingly sold what seems to be a pre-publication reader or something of that sort from Amazon Marketplace and that whole chapter turns out to be omitted from what I was sold.