"This volume includes a long run of his weekly strip “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend,” where he first visited the dreamscapes that would come to fill his celebrated “Little Nemo in Slumberland.” An illustrator’s hands become grotesque cauliflowers; a woman’s face grows gradually enormous; a census taker is forced to count all the flies in the world. The strips have none of the impossible vast, morphing architecture of “Nemo” or its innovative paneling, and yet for their banality they feel all the more authentic, and they retain an uncanny freshness even as they approach the same punch line: the dreamer awakens and angrily blames the previous evening’s Welsh rarebit for his dreams. Here McCay embraces, if not pioneers, one of the weirdest and unique pleasures of the serial comic: formula. It’s the strange poetry of expectations filled again and again, like Charlie Brown missing the football. Although, in McCay’s case, the punch lines grow increasingly baroque: “Oh dear!” exclaims one dreamer among hundreds. “Such is life in a big city. Welsh rarebits, huh? Fine dish. Not!!! Oof! I think I’ll get up. I can’t sleep. Nope! I’m done for. Oh oh!”
"Rain Taxi Review of Books"
Does anyone here speak rarebit?
Reviewed by John Hodgeman, NYT Book Review“Popular art in the USA owes a lot to Winsor McCay – Maurice Sendak once compared him to Lewis Carroll and Buster Keaton in the same sentence – so it is fitting to see his early cartoon work so assiduously collected.”
