Merkl’s DINOMANIA – McCay – Dinosaur Monsters – New York – King Kong

[1] 1905 — Git App! McCay’s very first dinosaur — drawn as ‘Silas’ with respect for the ‘paleontological facts…’ Dinosaur-jockey panel from Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, 4 March.

      
by Huib van Opstal

WORSHIP. For five years Ulrich Merkl has been chiseling away at his second book about Winsor McCay — Dinomania; The Lost Art of Winsor McCay, the Secret Origins of King Kong, and the Urge to Destroy New York — available now.

Ulrich Merkl (b.1965) is a German historian, a tireless researcher, writer and designer who lives and works in eastern Germany near Chemnitz, in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland. This large-sized book in words and images is about much, much more than dinosaurs and comic strips alone. Many full-page newspaper pages are reproduced in it. It certainly is the book for McCay worshipers.

[2] 1910-11 — The lines of McCay (as Silas) in close-up.

LINE DRAWN. Winsor McCay (1869-1934) did not have a particularly well-drawn line. Seen in close-up his lines were rarely singular and clearly drawn in hurried fashion. He manically scratched on in multifold-line mode. Outlines in his comic strips he often made thicker, giving panels and pages the look of lead framework in stained glass. 

For the period around 1911 when he made his pioneering animated movies — films for which he made all in-between drawings himself, in pen on paper, thousands and thousands of them, for once inking in an even singular line to ensure the best registration — Merkl describes McCay’s working method as:

‘…Religiously adhering to a schedule of seventeen working hours a day, and drawing in lightning fashion…’

[3] 1910-11 — The Giant Hand. A regular nightmare in the Dream of the Rarebit Fiend series, 2 February 1913. A strip actually drawn 2 or 3 years earlier.

A GIANT. What made McCay a real giant in the American comic strip field though, in the early 1900s, was his mastery of other vital aspects of the comic drawing trade. His mastery as a composer of giant newspaper strip designs in beaux arts styling, or his beautiful colouring and page layouts, or his giant editorial cartoons. His zany dream and nightmare subjects and various other absurdities make you nearly forget the plotless aspect of the larger part of his strips. 

Merkl’s two visual McCay books (this is his second) automatically stimulate your viewing because McCay absorbed many influences from many sources, and Merkl attempts to find them all. Dinomania has a glossary, an index, a bibliography and notes, and is chockfull of annotation and inspiration. Bless you Ulrich, for your dandy finds, although the design and reproduction choices made in it gave me nightmares.

★

PICTURE RHYME. Here’s some lovely picture rhyme proof I found last month of the similarities between a real mining machine as seen by photographer Lewis Hine (b.1874), and a machine-like dinosaur as drawn by Winsor McCay.

[4] 1908 — PICTURE A. Mining machine photo by Lewis Hine who noted: ‘Machine used in Gary, West Virginia, mine that digs the coal and loads it on the car. With it 3 men can do the work of 50 in the old way. Yet they use boys to drive and trap.’

[5] 1933 — PICTURE B. ‘Frightened By A Word — Technocracy,’ pagewide drawing by McCay, in San Francisco Examiner, Sunday 2 April, illustrating an Arthur Brisbane editorial.

[6] 1905 — Disaster comic. Watching a circus parade, the eternally sneezing Little Sammy destroys half a New York city street. Large comic book cover.

[7] 1934 — DINO. McCay’s long lost Dino strip, a cut out panel of original art.

[8] 1928 — THE ŒUVRE. The cover of Frans Masereel’s L’Œuvre; Soixante Bois Gravés, a story in sixty woodcuts with nearly no text.

[9] 1928 — THE ŒUVRE. Masereel’s story begins with a man who chisels away at a giant statue; a full-page woodcut.

[10] 1928-33 — THE ŒUVRE vs KING KONG. Ulrich Merkl’s picture rhyme proof of the similarities between Masereel’s Belgian book L’Œuvre (1928) and the American monster movie King Kong (1933), produced by Merian C. Cooper.

[11] 1928-33.

[12] 1928-33.    

[13] 2015 — At present Ulrich Merkl is working on his third McCay book: the biography of Winsor McCay.

★

DINOMANIA is published by Fantagraphics Books, 674 numbered illustrations, 296 pages, 40 x 30 cm (16 x 11.75 inch), hardback with dust jacket, ISBN 978-1-60699-840-3.

See and read more of Ulrich Merkl’s Dinomania in his own article last year in Yesterday’s Papers HERE.

Read Huib van Opstal’s review ‘Dreams and Obsessions on Shelf and Screen’ of Ulrich Merkl’s first McCay book plus CD from 2006 — The complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (1904-1913) by Winsor McCay ‘Silas’ — HERE.

See the Dinomania book for: [1] on page 77, [2] on 162-163, [3] on 174, [5] on 158-159 and the flyleaves, [6] on 171, [7] on 4 and 16 and the dust jacket, [10] [11] [12] on 208. The pictures [4], [8] and [9] are added here by Yesterday’s Papers.

Little Willie’s Dream strip

[1]

“…Wow! What a narrow escape eh!? Where did Broncho Billy go? Oh! I was only dreaming…”

★

COMIC HISTORIANS delight in finding unknown examples of comics mimicking the dénouement of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo dream strips where our hero falls out of bed to find it was only a dream. Examples can be found both before and after McCay began Little Nemo in Slumberland in the New York Herald on October 15, 1905.

Little Willie’s Dream was a 1914 comic strip feature in Motion Picture Magazine. W.H. Sheahan made a Little Willie’s Dream page for the November 1914 issue; L. Kirshbaum made one for the January 1914 issue.

Gilbert M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson (1880-1971, real name Max Aronson) while still a budding movie actor —‘lost his role as a mounted outlaw in The Great Train Robbery (1903) because he kept falling off his horse’ (Brownlow, 1978). He did eventually make it as an actor in Westerns though. His biggest success came when he decided to set up his own film company, together with George K. Spoor. An S for Spoor and an A for Anderson gave it its name: the Essanay Company (1908-16). Gilbert M. Anderson became the first ‘motion picture cowboy’ in over 500 short Broncho Billy Westerns, one-reelers, and finally two-reelers. All filmed in his own primitive little studio in Niles Canyon, California. It was there that the first Broncho Billy was made, in July 1910. Most of these short films are lost.

[2] Nov 1914. Willie ‘shall die at the stake…’ Little Willie’s Dream. One-pager by W.H. Sheahan; dream strip in Motion Picture Magazine.

[3] 1910s. Rerelease of the early Broncho Billy one-reel films or ‘photoplays.’

[4] 1912. “BRONCHO BILLY.” Essanay publicity photograph. ‘…Broncho Billy Anderson, dressed in the Easterner’s conception of the Western costume, derived largely from dime novels…’ (Fenin & Everson, 1973)

[5] Jan 1915. Willie is shown ‘how to ride a hawss…’ Little Willie’s Dream. One-pager by L. Kirshbaum; dream strip in Motion Picture Magazine.

[6] 1905-11. Little Nemo in Slumberland. Final.

★

The Lost Chord; or, Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady! – [Tom Noddy 3]

THERE ARE, as perhaps the reader knows, two different ways of drawing for wood. One is, to paint a finished picture in black and white, using the brush and washes of different degrees of intensity; picking out the lights with white, or leaving the white paper for them. The [wood] engraver translates this in his own way, cutting his own lines to represent or, rather, interpret the value of the tone left by the artist. In this case the artist is very much at the mercy of his engraver.
[…]
THE OTHER way is to draw one’s picture with pencil, or, better still, with pen and ink [on wood], using a simple conventional black outline to give the shape and enclose the form and face; then adding more lines and pen-and-ink scratches, simple or cross-hatched, to suggest colour and tone, as an etcher does with his needle, and leaving blank all that the artist judges non-essential to his picture — leaving it in fact, to the imagination. The engraver cuts all this in facsimile; it is more than his place is worth to add a line of his own, or leave out one of the artist’s.

[…]
I confess that, to me, the second is the more attractive of the two.

❉

THE LOST CHORD

by George du Maurier 

❉❦❉

in The Christmas Number of Punch

and Punch’s Almanack for 1894.

[1 to 4]

[5 to 8]

[9 to 12]

[13 to 16]

❉

QUOTE by George du Maurier, from his essay The Illustration of Books from the Serious Artist’s Point of View, in the Magazine of Art 13, 1890.

Thanks to Mr Punch.