McCay experimented with the formal elements of the comic strip page, arranging and sizing panels to increase impact and enhance the narrative.

His animation, vaudeville, and comic strip work was gradually curtailed as newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, his employer since 1911, expected McCay to devote his energies to editorial illustrations.

The technical level of McCay's animation—its naturalism, smoothness, and scale—was unmatched until the work of Fleischer Studios in the late 1920s, followed by Walt Disney's feature films in the 1930s.

McCay's maternal grandparents, Peter and Mary Murray, were also Scottish immigrants, and settled as farmers in East Zorra in Upper Canada.

[17] He traded art techniques there with painter Jules Guérin, whom he met at a boarding house in which he lodged, and did artwork for posters and pamphlets at the National Printing and Engraving Company.

[21] His first year at Kohl & Middleton, McCay was smitten when Maude Leonore Dufour walked into the dime museum with her sister while he was painting.

[25] From January until November 1903, McCay drew an ongoing proto-comic strip for the Enquirer based on poems written by George Randolph Chester called A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle.

A rivalry built up between the two cartoonists which resulted in Outcault leaving the Herald to return to his previous employer, William Randolph Hearst at The New York Journal.

[33] The McCays had been living in Manhattan, close to the Herald offices; before 1905 they moved to Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, New York, a seaside resort on Long Island.

[43] McCay experimented with formal aspects of the comics page: he made inventive use of timing and pacing, the size and shape of panels, perspective, and architectural and other details.

[45] For $500 per week he was to draw twenty-five sketches in fifteen minutes before live audiences, as a pit band played a piece called "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend".

In mid-1907, Marcus Klaw and A. L. Erlanger announced they would put on an extravagant Little Nemo show for an unprecedented $100,000, with a score by Victor Herbert[50] and lyrics by Harry B.

Live-action sequences were added to the beginning and end of the film, in which McCay bets his newspaper colleagues that in one month he can make four thousand drawings that move.

The Herald held the strip's copyright,[64] but McCay won a lawsuit that allowed him to continue using the characters,[65] which he did under the title In the Land of Wonderful Dreams.

[71] Producer William Fox's Box Office Attractions obtained distribution rights to a modified version of Gertie that could be played in regular movie theaters.

[81] McCay was expected to report daily to the American building, where he shared a ninth-floor office with humorist Arthur "Bugs" Baer and sports cartoonist Joe McGurk.

Advertising touted it as "the picture that will never have a competitor";[89] the film itself called McCay "the originator and inventor of Animated Cartoons"[89] and drew attention to the fact that it took 25,000 drawings to complete.

[109] In 1932, McCay found himself in what he recalled as "the wildest ride" in his life when Hearst's son "Young Bill" drove him at 85 miles per hour (137 km/h) to the scene of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.

He worked for a short time at the Hearst papers, and tried unsuccessfully to get a job at the Disney studios, before finding a career as illustrator for Training Aids/Special Services at Fort Ord.

[117] He was self-taught at the piano,[117] and was an avid reader of poetry, plays and novels; he admired W. B. Yeats, knew the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, and could quote the Bible and Shakespeare.

[80] McCay's brother Arthur was placed in a mental hospital in Traverse City, Michigan on March 7, 1898, where he stayed until his death from bronchopneumonia and arteriosclerosis on June 15, 1946.

[130] In 1966, cartoonist Woody Gelman discovered the original artwork for many Little Nemo strips at a cartoon studio where McCay's son Robert had worked.

Art Spiegelman's 1974 "Real Dream" strip was partially inspired by Rarebit Fiend,[138] and his In the Shadow of No Towers in 2004 appropriated some of McCay's imagery, and included a page of Little Nemo in its appendix.

[141] Cartoonist Berke Breathed lamented that the conditions of newspaper cartooning had devolved to such a degree since McCay's time that, had he worked later in the century, he would not have been allotted space sufficient for his expansive full-page fantasies.

But it can be proved that McCay's influence, at least in a secondhand manner, reached Freud: Hungarian artist Nándor Honti, heavily inspired by McCay's Rarebit Fiend, which he had seen when he lived in the United States from 1903 to about 1907, created a comic page titled "A Francia Bonne Álma" ("A French Nanny's Dream", often called "A French Nurse's Dream", 1911), which was passed to Sigmund Freud by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi.

Honti's comic strongly resembles the work of McCay in its theme,[144] pacing, Art Nouveau style, and closing panel of the dreamer awakening in bed.

Near-contemporary George Herriman with Krazy Kat was the most notable example, but it was not until a generation later that cartoonists such as Frank King with Gasoline Alley, Hal Foster with Prince Valiant, and Roy Crane with Captain Easy attempted such daring designs on their Sunday pages.

The Maison Quantin [fr] of Paris published a series of illustrated books called Images Enphantines, whose pages bear a striking resemblance to McCay's early Little Nemo strips, both in their graphic sense and their imaginative layouts.

[153] To Canemaker, McCay had an "absolute precision of line"[85] akin to those of Northern Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer and 19th-century French illustrator Gustave Doré.

[157] In contrast to the high level of skill in the artwork, the dialogue in McCay's speech balloons is crude, sometimes approaching illegibility,[158] and "disfigur[ing] his otherwise flawless work",[142] according to critic R. C.