McCay, the “son of a Michigan lumberman,” in the words of biographer John Canemaker, got his start in dime museums and carnival theater, painting posters and advertisements for unusual midway acts. He parlayed his talent into a steady cartooning gig at the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune as a teenager. This alone wouldn’t have been an unusual origin story for an a young artist in a vibrant time for American print media—George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat, also came up from working-class roots to find opportunity in the newspaper industry, and Robert Ripley, of Believe or Not fame, was a high school drop-out who started out as a sports cartoonist.
In McCay, it was a combination of expansive imagination, multi-disciplinary eccentricity, and restless work ethic that set him apart. In 1905, after working on a handful of comic properties, he debuted what would become his signature strip, a sprawling full-page color adventure called “Little Nemo in Slumberland.” The series was an elegant fantasy in which the young title character, whose name means “no one,” is drawn from his bedroom into boisterous adventures in Slumberland, where walking beds, Godzilla-sized turkeys, and races through the stars were common fare. Each full-page story ended with Nemo suddenly waking up in his own bed, begging the reader to consider what might be real and what might be a dream. Film scholar Tom W. Hoffer notes that in Nemo, either
the objects were bigger than life, the characters deviants from reality, or the environments fantastic. Quite often the dreams…were attributed to eating something before bedtime, helping to base the fantasy in the logic of reality.
The strip was an instant sensation.
The early years of the twentieth century were a boom time for the newspaper industry. As media scholar Conrad Smith points out, from 1870 to 1900, daily news circulation rose from 2.6 million to 15 million copies. As a result, early animators acquired a mass market—and a certain cachet: with presses rolling off color Sunday editions, magnates like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst used cartoonists as star players to draw readership.
“As movement was the element which drew Nickelodeon audiences to the feats of the Lumieres, Edison and Melies,” writes John L. Fell, “color insured strip cartoons their ‘readers.’”
In this sort of environment, with the benefit of reach and budget, comics could be self-acknowledged ephemera, exist in a commercial medium, and still regard themselves as serious art. Moreover, as media started to think of itself in increasingly dynamic fashion, comics too started to play with the idea of physical and mental space.