Dream of the Rarebit Fiend
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was a newspaper comic strip by American cartoonist Winsor McCay which began September 10, 1904. As in McCay's signature strip, Little Nemo, the strip was made up of bizarre dreams. It was McCay's second successful strip, after Little Sammy Sneeze secured him a position on the cartoon staff of the New York Herald. Rarebit Fiend was printed in the Evening Telegram, a newspaper published by the Herald. For contractual reasons, McCay signed the strip with the pen name "Silas".
The strip had no continuity or recurring characters. Instead, it had a recurring theme: a character would have a nightmare or other bizarre dream, usually after eating a Welsh rarebit (a cheese-on-toast dish). The character would awaken from the dream in the last panel, regretting having eaten the rarebit. The dreams often revealed the darker sides of the dreamers' psyches—their phobias, hypocrisies, discomforts, and dark fantasies. This was in great contrast to the colorful, childlike fantasy dreams in Little Nemo. The strip is mostly recognized as an adult-oriented precursor to Nemo.
The popularity of Rarebit Fiend and Nemo led to McCay being hired for William Randolph Hearst's chain of newspapers with a star's salary. His editor there thought his highly skilled cartooning was "serious, not funny", and he was made to give up comic strips to do editorial cartooning. The strip was revived 1923–1925 as Rarebit Reveries, though few examples have survived.
Rarebit Fiend was the inspiration for a number of films, including Edwin S. 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. The strip is said to have anticipated a number of recurring ideas in popular culture, such as giant characters damaging cities (as later popularized by King Kong and Godzilla).
