Winsor McCay
Legacy

It is as though the first creature to emerge from the primeval slime was Albert Einstein; and the second was an amoeba, because after McCay's animation it took his followers nearly twenty years to find out how he did it. The two most important people in animation are Winsor McCay and Walt Disney, and I'm not sure which should go first.

—Animator Chuck Jones

In 1937, McCay's son Robert attempted to carry on his father's legacy by reviving Little Nemo. Comic book packager Harry "A" Chesler 's syndicate announced a Sunday and daily Nemo strip, credited to "Winsor McCay Jr." Robert also drew a comic book version for Chesler called Nemo in Adventureland starring grown-up versions of Nemo and the Princess. Neither project lasted long. In 1947, Robert and fabric salesman Irving Mendelsohn organized the McCay Feature Syndicate, Inc. to revive the original Nemo strip from McCay's original art, modified to fit the size of modern newspaper pages. This revival also did not last.

McCay's original artwork has been poorly preserved. McCay insisted on having his originals returned to him, and a large collection that survived him was destroyed in a fire in the late 1930s. His wife was unsure how to handle the surviving pieces, so his son took on the responsibility and moved the collection to his own house. The family sold off some of the artwork when they were in need of cash. Responsibility for it passed to Mendelsohn, then later to daughter Marion. By the early twenty-first century, most of McCay's surviving artwork remained in family hands.

McCay destroyed many of his original cans of film to create more storage space. Of what film he kept, much has not survived, as it was photographed on 35mm nitrate film, which decomposes and is highly flammable. Mendelsohn's son and a friend, both young animators, discovered the film in Mendelsohn's possession in 1947 and rescued what they could. In some cases, such as The Centaurs, only fragments could be saved. A negative and incomplete positive was discovered of Performing Animals, a film of animals playing instruments that may have been intended for McCay's vaudeville act; it was deemed unsalvageable and destroyed.

In 1966, cartoonist Woody Gelman discovered the original artwork for many Little Nemo strips at a cartoon studio where McCay's son Robert had worked. Many of the recovered originals were displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the direction of curator A. Hyatt Mayor. In 1973, Gelman published a collection of Little Nemo strips in Italy. His collection of McCay originals is preserved at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University.

McCay's work, grounded solidly in his understanding of realistic perspective, presaged the techniques featured in Walt Disney 's feature films. Disney paid tribute to McCay in 1955 on an episode of Disneyland. The episode, "The Story of Animated Drawing", gave a history of animation, and dramatized McCay's vaudeville act with Gertie. Robert was invited to the Disney studios as a consultant on the episode, where Disney told him, "Bob, all this should be your father's".

Animator and McCay biographer John Canemaker produced a film in 1974 called Remembering Winsor McCay, narrated by McCay's animation assistant John Fitzsimmons. Canemaker helped coordinate the first retrospective of McCay's films at the third International Animation Film Festival in 1975 in New York, which led to a film show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in winter 1975–76. Canemaker also wrote a biography in 1987 called Winsor McCay: His Life and Art. In 2005, a revised and expanded version of the biography was released, which comics scholar Jeet Heer called "far and away the most scholarly and intelligent biography ever written about an American cartoonist". Animation scholar Paul Wells stated, "McCay's influence on the history of animation cannot be understated". Film critic Richard Eder lamented that as an animation pioneer McCay was not able to reach the potential suggested by his work. Eder compared McCay to the Italian primitives of the early Renaissance, highly skilled "in the limited techniques they could command". Heer wrote that McCay's strength was in his visuals, but that his writing and characters were weak.

Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini read Little Nemo in the children's magazine Il corriere dei piccoli, and the strip was a "powerful influence" on the filmmaker, according to Fellini biographer Peter Bondanella. Comics historian R. C. Harvey has called McCay "the first original genius of the comic strip medium" and in animation. Harvey said that McCay's contemporaries lacked the skill to continue with his innovations, so that they were left for future generations to rediscover and build upon.

McCay's work has inspired cartoonists from Carl Barks to Art Spiegelman. Robert Crumb called McCay a "genius" and one of his favorite cartoonists. Art Spiegelman 's 1974 "Real Dream" strip was partially inspired by Rarebit Fiend, and his In the Shadow of No Towers in 2004 appropriated some of McCay's imagery, and included a page of Little Nemo in its appendix. Maurice Sendak 's children's book In the Night Kitchen (1970) was an homage to McCay's work, as was Rick Veitch ' comic book series Roarin' Rick's Rarebit Fiends (1994–96). Kim Deitch and Simon Deitch's graphic novel The Boulevard of Broken Dreams revolved around a character named Winsor Newton, based on an aged McCay. Cartoonist Berke Breathed lamented that the conditions of newspaper cartooning had devolved to such a degree since McCay's time that, had he worked later in the century, he would not have been allotted space sufficient for his expansive full-page fantasies.

As Sigmund Freud 's The Interpretation of Dreams first appeared in print in 1899, McCay's major dream strips work have invited speculation of a Freudian influence. But it can be proved that McCay's influence, at least in a secondhand manner, reached Freud: Hungarian artist Nándor Honti, heavily inspired by McCay's Rarebit Fiend, which he had seen when he lived in the United States from 1903 to about 1907, created a comic page titled "A Francia Bonne Álma" ("A French Nanny's Dream", often called "A French Nurse's Dream", 1911), which was passed to Sigmund Freud by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi. Freud then included the comic in the 1914 edition of his book. Honti's comic strongly resembles the work of McCay in its theme, pacing, Art Nouveau style, and closing panel of the dreamer awakening in bed.

The Winsor McCay Award was established in 1972 to recognize individuals for lifetime or career contributions in animation, and is presented as part of the Annie Awards. The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles devoted a room to McCay's work as part of the Masters of American Comics exhibit in 2005. German publisher Taschen published a complete, boxed, full-size edition of Little Nemo in two volumes in 2014 entitled The Complete Little Nemo.

The American astronomer Roy A. Tucker named the asteroid 113461 after McCay in 2002.

Despite dispute over his birthplace, a public park and historical marker honor McCay in Spring Lake, Michigan. The marker, unveiled in 2009, is located in Winsor McCay Park. Winsor McCay Park is the modern-day location of where Union School once stood, wherein McCay "illustrated his first 'commercial' for-sale illustration" in 1880. Developers have been working since 2009 to develop the park into a more sophisticated memorial to McCay including "a large Gertie the Dinosaur statue at the entrance of the park...a bronze statue of Winsor McCay that will be placed next to the historical marker/sign Gertie the Dinosaur stepping-stone footprints will meander through the park, leading back to a scaled-down replica of Union School."
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