Dream of The Rarebit Fiend - Overview

Overview

Winsor McCay first produced the hallucinogenic Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in 1904, a year before his dream romps of Little Nemo and a full generation before the Surrealist movement unleashed their subconscious on the public. The strip had no recurring characters, but followed one theme: after eating a Welsh rarebit, the day's protagonist would be subject to the darker side of his or her psyche. Typically, the strip would begin with an absurd situation, which would progressively become more absurd until the Fiend—the dreamer—awakened in the final panel. Some situations were merely silly: elephants falling from the ceiling, or two ladies' mink coats having a fight. Other times, they could be more disturbing: characters would find themselves dismembered, another buried alive from a first-person perspective or a child's mother being planted and becoming a tree. In some strips, the Fiend was a spectator, watching fantastic or horrible things happen to someone close to themselves. The typically bourgeois, urban protagonists were often subjected to fears related to public humiliation or loss of social esteem or respectability.

Rarebit Fiend was the only of McCay's strips in which he took on social or political topics, or dealt with contemporary life. He addressed religious leaders, alcoholism, homelessness, political speeches, suicide, fashion, and other topics, unlike his other strips which had fantasy or seemingly vague, timeless backgrounds. The strip had a number of references to contemporary events, such as the 1904 election of Theodore Roosevelt; the recently built Flatiron Building (1902) and St. Regis Hotel (1904) in New York City; and the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War.

The rarebit, a dish typically made with rich cheese thinned with ale, and served melted on toast with cayenne and mustard mixed in, was used despite its innocuousness—according to cultural theorist Scott Bukatman, it was not the sort of dish one would associate with having nightmares.

McCay's most famous character, Little Nemo, first appeared in Dream of the Rarebit Fiend during its first year. In 1905, McCay would have the character appear in his own strip in the New York Herald. In comparison to that better-known strip, the Rarebit Fiend strips had minimal backgrounds, and were usually done from a fixed perspective, with the main characters often in a fixed position. The content of Rarebit Fiend played a much bigger role than it did in Little Nemo, whose focus was on beautiful visuals. The stories were self-contained, whereas the Nemo story continued from week to week. The dreams in Nemo were aimed at children, but Rarebit Fiend had more adult-oriented subjects—social embarrassment, fear of dying or going insane, and so on—although some of the dreams in both strips were wish-fulfillment fantasies.

Unlike most comic strips at the time, Rarebit Fiend was not humorous or escapist. The strips highlighted readers' darker selves—hypocrisies, deceitfulness, phobias and discomfort. The strip offered often biting social commentary, and marital, money and religious matters are shown in a negative light. McCay was interested in pushing formal boundaries, and playful self-referentiality played a role in many of the strips, with characters sometimes referring to McCay's alter-ego "Silas", or to the reader. Though frequent in Rarebit Fiend, this self-referentiality does not appear in McCay's other strips.

In contrast to the skilled artwork, the lettering in the dialogue balloons, like in McCay's other work, was awkward and could approach illegibility, especially in reproductions, where the artwork was normally greatly reduced in size. McCay seemed to show little regard for the dialogue balloons, their content, and their placement in the visual composition. They tended to contain repetitive monologues expressing the increasing distress of the speakers, and showed that McCay's gift was in the visual and not the verbal.