Other times, they could be more disturbing: characters finding themselves dismembered, buried alive from a first-person perspective or a child's mother being planted and becoming a tree. Some situations were merely silly: elephants falling from the ceiling, or two women's mink coats having a fight. Typically, the strip would begin with an absurd situation which became more and more absurd until the Fiend-the dreamer-awakened in the final panel. The strip had no recurring characters, but followed a theme: after eating a Welsh rarebit, the day's protagonist would be subject to the darker side of his psyche. Winsor McCay first produced Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in 1904, a year before the dream romps of his Little Nemo and a full generation before the artists of the Surrealist movement unleashed the unconscious on the public. The strip is said to have anticipated a number of recurring ideas in popular culture, such as marauding giant beasts damaging cities-as later popularized by King Kong and Godzilla.Ī Welsh rarebit-seasoned melted cheese on toast Porter's live-action Dream of a Rarebit Fiend in 1906, and four pioneering animated films by McCay himself: How a Mosquito Operates in 1912, and 1921's Bug Vaudeville, The Pet, and The Flying House.

McCay revived the strip in 1923–1925 as Rarebit Reveries, of which few examples have survived.Ī number of film adaptations of Rarebit Fiend have appeared, including Edwin S. His editor there thought McCay's highly skilled cartooning 'serious, not funny', and had McCay give up comic strips in favor of editorial cartooning. The popularity of Rarebit Fiend and Nemo led to McCay gaining a contract in 1911 with William Randolph Hearst's chain of newspapers with a star's salary. Whereas children were Nemo 's target audience, McCay aimed Rarebit Fiend at adults. This was in great contrast to the colorful fantasy dreams in McCay's signature strip Little Nemo, which he began in 1905.

The dreams often reveal unflattering sides of the dreamers' psyches-their phobias, hypocrisies, discomforts, and dark fantasies. The character awakens in the closing panel and regrets having eaten the rarebit. The strip had no continuity or recurring characters, but a recurring theme: a character has a nightmare or other bizarre dream, usually after eating a Welsh rarebit-a cheese-on-toast dish. For contractual reasons, McCay signed the strip with the pen name 'Silas'. Rarebit Fiend appeared in the Evening Telegram, a newspaper published by the Herald. It was McCay's second successful strip, after Little Sammy Sneeze secured him a position on the cartoon staff of the New York Herald. Dream of the Rarebit Fiend is a newspaper comic strip by American cartoonist Winsor McCay, begun September 10, 1904.

Little nemo comic strip