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Bashful Barry Pearl sent me this post to celebrate me being back on the Internet, but the content was part of an earlier guest post by Barry. Obviously, in his desire to be helpful, he'd forgotten he'd already submitted it previously, but what does it matter? I republish some of my posts all the time, so a partial repeat of one of Barry's won't go amiss. Ready? Off we go!
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Winsor McCay was the brilliant creator of one on my favorite and most influential comic strips, “Little Nemo in Slumberland”. In 2016, Taschen published a complete set of his illustration along with a separate book (shown here) by Alexander Braun. Braun shows how McCay influenced many artists (Ditko, Kirby, Meskin and others) and many publishers. Here is an excerpt from his book, where he is discussing Winsor’s son, Robert, and his experiences in the comic book world of the 1950s and 1960s.
Robert McCay's career path, working for different publishers and in various kinds of jobs, was winding, and none of his jobs lasted very long. He even worked for DC Comics in the first half of the 1940s, but only as a production assistant and colourist
By the early 1950s, Sigmund Freud's teachings on psychoanalysis had arrived at the center of society, more so in the United States than in Europe. The idea of depicting the analysis of dreams in the form of a comic practically seemed unavoidable - especially after the pictorial creations of the Surrealists: Dali's motifs, in particular, enjoyed a great deal of popularity. To do so, it no longer had to be in the same tradition as McCay's work. Rather, illustrators sought to come close to medical plausibility. They wanted to tell "true" stories from the unconscious mind and to decode these for their audience. In 1952, the studio of Joe Simon (1913-2011) and Jack Kirby (1917-1994), together with their closest colleagues, Mort Meskin (1916-1995) and Bill Draut (1921-1993), launched the strip The Strange World of Your Dreams for Price Publications. Mort Meskin, in particular, was a driving force behind the project. He had read Freud's writings, had been a patient in a sanatorium, and practiced a form of therapy developed by the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), who had fled from the National Socialists in 1939 and immigrated to New York, where he then continued his work.
As dream experts, the team surrounding Jack Kirby introduced the char-acter Richard Temple, to whose New York address readers could send their dreams to be analyzed. If a dream was chosen to be adapted into a comic story, the submitter would receive $25. Whether the money was ever actually paid out, and whether there really was a Richard Temple, has never been determined, but seems rather doubtful. It soon became clear that the comic-book series that appealed to an adult readership would not find enough readers. After just four issues, the experiment was brought to an end in 1953. The target audience had simply been too imprecisely defined. With the cover artwork, the creators flirted with the style of the extremely successful horror comic books of the time, but they could not and did not want to be as explicit. Aside from this, they had had women readers in mind while launching this topic, but women preferred the romantic comic books that had been launched by the Simon/Kirby studio itself beginning in 1947.
As dream experts, the team surrounding Jack Kirby introduced the char-acter Richard Temple, to whose New York address readers could send their dreams to be analyzed. If a dream was chosen to be adapted into a comic story, the submitter would receive $25. Whether the money was ever actually paid out, and whether there really was a Richard Temple, has never been determined, but seems rather doubtful. It soon became clear that the comic-book series that appealed to an adult readership would not find enough readers. After just four issues, the experiment was brought to an end in 1953. The target audience had simply been too imprecisely defined. With the cover artwork, the creators flirted with the style of the extremely successful horror comic books of the time, but they could not and did not want to be as explicit. Aside from this, they had had women readers in mind while launching this topic, but women preferred the romantic comic books that had been launched by the Simon/Kirby studio itself beginning in 1947.
(After) The 1954 passage of the Comics Code… Robbed of its basis of existence, EC Comics, in particular, tried to develop new topic areas for comics. Thus the publisher William Gaines (1922-1992) - who had experience with therapy himself - made an attempt with the comic-book series Psychoanalysis in 1955. This endeavor to make the decryption of dreams useful for comics did not find a large enough audience either and was also cancelled after only four issues.
It is likely that, through his frequent change in employers, Robert McCay also met Steve Ditko (1927-), who, in terms of age, could have been his son. After graduating from art school, Ditko first worked in Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's studio beginning in 1953, then for Charlton Comics, and finally for Atlas Comics, the precursor to Marvel Comics, where he developed The Amazing Spider-Man with Stan Lee beginning in 1962. A very remarkable story for the 26th issue of Tales to Astonish dates back to December 1961 - five months before Robert McCay's death (see above): A man dreams that he floats out of his bed and his window. Startled, he awakes only to discover that, once again, he begins to float - yet again trapped in a dream, and so on: Can we be sure that we wake in reality and not just in another dream. This kind of fantasy exposition that is not concerned with the cause of decoding the dream but carries the absurdity of dreams to an extreme for its own sake is in keeping with the spirit of Winsor McCay.
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