Winsor McCay is regarded by many as the first great master of both the comic strip and the animated cartoon. He is best known for his strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, whose visual elegance and thematic originality set a high watermark never surpassed in the medium.

Born Winsor Zenic McCay in Spring Lake, Michigan, in either 1869 or 1871, he studied art briefly in 1888 at Ypsilanti Normal College. Unable to afford further art instruction, McCay found work painting signs and illustrating for theatrical productions and traveling circuses, an exposure to fantasy illustration that was to prepare him for his later career in the comics. In 1889, he went to Cincinnati and created posters for a carnival.&nbs...