They publish in two volumes the collected Little Nemo books. These are full sized 16 inches by 24 inches books. They are really gorgeous A little pricey and they are hard to store because they are a weird shaped.
It’s not just that. This, as far as he knew, was the first time anyone had animated drawings (McKay’s distributor himself had made animated object films) But he already has the concepts of squash and sttretch, so beloved of the Disney school, down pat. He also draws his objects so that they have true three-dimensionality. His characters have and maintain the same apparent dimensions as the move and turn. Either he made models – manquees – to use as guides to the way his characters should appear from different angles, or else he was so gifted that he could visualize them properly in his head (I suspect McKay was actually capable of this).
This is an extremely easy thing to not get right. I’ve seen lotsd of animation that didn’t, and some that didn’t even try. Heck, I’ve tried animation myself, and didn’t get it right. Nobody would’ve noticed if McKay didn’t – they would’ve been wowed simply by the fact that his drawings moved.
But McKay got it right on the first try (or else destroyed his rough attempts – and didn’t take a lot of time working up to his finished product). Tha’s impressive as all heck.
Near the end of his life, the new breed of cartoonists gave McKay an appreciation dinner, at which McKay expressed his dislike at how commercial the field had gotten, and the poor quality of much of what was then being turned out. He really was, evidently, an artist who was in it for artistic perfection, and not for the money. As with the case of Melies, we are lucky to have his earliest work at all – it wasn’t preserved through efforts of any organization watching out for his stuff, but because someone had kept copies of vthe films in their garage.
White people problems.
I had assumed Gertie was before this.
Looking at his strips, I agree. He had an astonishing gift for perspective. I can’t think of another artist who did anything comparable.