Dream of the Rarebit Fiend is a newspaper comic strip by American cartoonist Winsor McCay, begun September 10, 1904.

The popularity of Rarebit Fiend and Nemo led to McCay gaining a contract in 1911 with William Randolph Hearst's chain of newspapers with a star's salary.

The strip had no recurring characters, but followed a theme: after eating a Welsh rarebit, the day's protagonist would be subject to the darker side of his psyche.

Other times, they could be more disturbing:[2] characters finding themselves dismembered, buried alive from a first-person perspective[3] or a child's mother being planted and becoming a tree.

[4] The protagonists are typically, but not always, of America’s growing middle-class urban population whom McCay subjects to fears of public humiliation, or loss of social esteem or respectability, or just the uncontrollably weird nature of being.

He addressed religious leaders, alcoholism, homelessness, political speeches, suicide, fashion, and other topics, whereas his other strips were fantasy or had seemingly vague, timeless backgrounds.

[6] The strip referenced contemporary events such as the 1904 election of Theodore Roosevelt; the recently built Flatiron Building (1902) and St. Regis Hotel (1904) in New York City; and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05.

[7] The rarebit is a dish typically made with rich cheese thinned with ale and served melted on toast with cayenne and mustard mixed in.

[12] In comparison to Little Nemo, the artwork of the Rarebit Fiend strips had minimal backgrounds,[13] and were usually done from a static perspective with the main characters often in a fixed position.

They tend to contain repetitive monologues expressing the increasing distress of the speakers, and show that McCay's gift was in the visual and not the verbal.

He became known for his ability to draw quickly, a talent he often employed during chalk talks on the vaudeville stage (alongside the likes of Harry Houdini and W. C. Fields).

[23] McCay first proposed a strip in which a tobacco fiend finds himself at the North Pole, unable to secure a cigarette and a light.

[25] After switching to William Randolph Hearst's New York American newspaper in 1911, McCay dropped the "Silas" pseudonym and signed his work with his own name.

Images of small, shy men dominated by their taller or fatter wives appear frequently in Rarebit Fiend.

[29] Gigantism, with characters overwhelmed by rapidly growing elements, was another recurring motif, perhaps as compensation on McCay's part for a sense of smallness.

These include Edward Lear's popular The Book of Nonsense (1870),[32] Gelett Burgess' The Burgess Nonsense Book (1901), Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) (particularly the pool of tears scene, which seems related to the flood of sweat in one early Rarebit Fiend strip[33]), and a variety of dream cartoons and illustrations that appeared in various periodicals McCay was likely familiar with.

Cummins stated that he drew inspiration for this collection of fifteen science fiction stories from nightmares brought on by eating Welsh rarebit and lobster.

[34] Other influences have been established: H. G. Wells, L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy (1904), Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb" (1889), Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis (1896), Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Mark Twain's "The 1,000,000 Pound Bank-Note" (1893).

The Dover edition dropped the final strip from the original collection as it contained ethnic humor that the publisher believed would not be to the taste of a 1970s audience.

[46] Rarebit Fiend examples appear in Daydreams and Nightmares (Fantagraphics, 1988/2006; editor Richard Marschall), a collection of miscellaneous work by McCay.

[21] The book also featured two essays by Italian comics editor Alfredo Castelli[51] and one by Jeremy Taylor,[49] former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.

The Fiend was played by John P. Brawn, who is tormented by imps in his bed, which flies through the air and leaves him hanging from a steeple—a scene similar to that of an early strips[53] that ran on January 28, 1905.

In the fantasy Bug Vaudeville, a tramp comes out from a group of meticulously drawn trees and falls asleep, muttering that cheese cakes give him strange dreams.

[23] Against the backdrop of the rapidly urbanizing United States of the 1910s and 1920s, one house from the artificial grid of modern, planned America takes flight in the dream of a woman who has feasted on Welsh rarebit.

He attaches a propeller to a shaft out front of the house, and tells his wife that his actions are in reaction to their landlord's intention to evict them over nonpayment.

[70] Comics scholar Jeet Heer called Rarebit Fiend "perhaps the most bizarre newspaper feature in American history".

[1] Merkl notes examples of the strip presaging ideas and scenes in later media: the strip includes scenes in which a man kicks a dog, slaps a woman, beats a blind man, and throws another woman out a window, as in Luis Buñuel's film L'Age d'Or (1930);[71] and giant characters let loose in the big city, climbing and damaging buildings and subway trains, as in King Kong (1933).

[74] Stephen R. Bissette compares a strip featuring elevators flying from buildings and other scenes to the 2005 Tim Burton's take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

[76] Science fiction illustrator Frank R. Paul painted a number of pulp magazine covers influenced by Rarebit Fiend.

Beginning in 1994, he put out twenty-one issues of Roarin' Rick's Rare Bit Fiends from his own King Hell Press.