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Winsor McCay
Life Time
26 September 1871 - 26 July 1934
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Outstanding American artist and pioneer of the genre of comics and animation. He began his career as a staff editorial cartoonist for the Commercial Tribune newspaper in Cincinnati in 1898 and six years later gained attention with the experimental comic book series The Tales of the Jungle Imps. As a result of the success that came to McCay comics, the leadership of the New York Herald Tribune invited McKay to draw for their publication a series of comics for adults. In 1904, the newspapers debuted
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Outstanding American artist and pioneer of the genre of comics and animation. He began his career as a staff editorial cartoonist for the Commercial Tribune newspaper in Cincinnati in 1898 and six years later gained attention with the experimental comic book series The Tales of the Jungle Imps. As a result of the success that came to McCay comics, the leadership of the New York Herald Tribune invited McKay to draw for their publication a series of comics for adults. In 1904, the newspapers debuted "Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend" (1904), a series of episodes consisting of nightmare hallucinations of characters caused by overeating Welsh cheese pie before bed. McKay soon became famous for his main creation, Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–27).
Under the influence of the prevailing style of Art Nouveau at that time, McKay created a real comic book saga from carefully drawn and extremely detailed complex scenes describing the fantastic journeys and adventures of the hero - Baby Nemo.
Returning again to the theme of extraordinary dreams and futuristic fantasies, the comic book “Baby Nemo in Sleepy Country” instantly gained huge popularity both among children and adults (in particular, the comic was inspired by the great director Federico Fellini). All the stories of McKay about Baby Nemo combined elements of traditional fairy tales, but the artist went beyond the usual narrative and brilliantly adapted fabulous motifs to the modern developments of the technical progress of the time, thereby setting a high bar for the nascent comic genre. Prolific artist McKay in 1909 decides to put his first drawn film "Baby Nemo", in which he created earlier comic characters moved and changed their images. For his tape, Winsor McKay created more than 4,000 drawings, on which he worked for more than four years, and also painted all the shots by hand, which sounds very impressive today. Thus, unnoticed to himself, he made a real revolution in the then black and white American animation.
In 1912, a group of newspaper cartoonists from Chicago took a car tour of New York City. Among other attractions, the artists visited the American Museum of Natural History, where, among other things, dinosaur skeletons stood. At the Museum of Graphics, Winsor McKay and George McManus made a bet. McKay promised to "bring Brontosaurus back to life" and a few months later was the winner of the dispute, hand-drawing 10,000 (!) frames of "Gerty the Dinosaur." McKay won the argument, and the world cinema was enriched by a new genre - dinosaur films! Later, the artist created about ten more animated films and continued to work on comics and cartoons until the end of his life.