Dream of the Rarebit Fiend
By Winsor McCay
Checker Book Publishing Group
$19.95 US
Review by John F. D. Taff
Winsor McCay was one of those talented people who often get lost in the pages of history. Wildly popular in his own day, McCay was an illustrator who produced a comic strip of the same name from 1904 through 1911 in the New York Evening Telegraph.
The comic strip was a wildly inventive, almost hallucinogenic cartoon, taking its cue each issue from a person’s dreams following the consumption of a “rarebit”—a toasted cheese sandwich.
As the book says, the strips were so popular they basically kept the Telegraph in business for a number of years. McCay used surreal, Freudian, sometimes almost Dali-esque illustrations and storyline to illustrate the various fads and angsts of the day.
And make no mistake, though some of the strips are topical and seriously outdated (several of them wincingly depict various African-Americans in full Amos ‘n’ Andy dialect), most of them are odd enough to have been written in the drug-induced ‘60s.
The book itself is nicely produced in an oversize format that allows the strips to be reproduced large enough so that the illustrator’s somewhat crabbed handwriting is still legible.
This book is actually a second printing. Obscure though McCay might be, the publisher’s first edition sold out while still on the presses.
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