Winsor McCay

Winsor McCay (c. 1869–1934) was an American cartoonist, animator, and illustrator, known for the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland and pioneering animated films including Gertie the Dinosaur.

Little Nemo in Slumberland: A newspaper comic strip by Winsor McCay, celebrated for dreamlike imagery and elaborate page layouts. Its shifting architecture and nightly adventures became McCay’s signature comic achievement.
Keyframe animation: An animation method in which important poses are drawn first and intermediate frames are added to create motion. McCay drew successive images by hand to make characters move convincingly.
American comic strip: A sequence of cartoon panels published regularly in American newspapers, especially from the late nineteenth century onward. McCay’s serialized newspaper work helped establish the comic strip as an expressive art form.
George McManus: An American cartoonist best known for creating the newspaper comic strip Bringing Up Father. McManus was a contemporary newspaper cartoonist working in the same popular medium.
Early animation: The experimental and commercial animated films made before animation became a mature studio industry. McCay’s films demonstrated animation’s artistic possibilities before standardized production took hold.
Gertie the Dinosaur: A 1914 animated film in which Winsor McCay interacts with a drawn dinosaur in a staged vaudeville act. The film made a characterful animated dinosaur the centerpiece of McCay’s live performance.
Persistence of vision: The continued perception of an image briefly after its stimulus disappears. Rapid projection of separate drawings helped produce the impression of continuous movement.
New York Herald: An influential New York newspaper founded by James Gordon Bennett Sr. in 1835. The Herald published Little Nemo and gave McCay a prominent platform.
John Randolph Bray: An American animator and producer who helped industrialize animation production in the 1910s. Bray’s studio methods contrasted with McCay’s largely individual, hand-drawn practice.
Comic strip Sunday page: A large-format newspaper page devoted to a comic strip, traditionally published on Sundays. Little Nemo used the Sunday page’s space for unusually ambitious compositions.

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