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| Author(s) | Winsor McCay |
| Launch date | July 24, 1904 |
| End date | December 9, 1906 |
| Publisher(s) | New York Herald |
| Followed by | Dream of the Rarebit Fiend |
Little Sammy Sneeze was a comic strip by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. In each episode the titular Sammy sneezed himself into an awkward or disastrous predicament. The strip ran from July 24, 1904, until December 9, 1906, in the New York Herald, where McCay was on the staff. It was McCay's first successful comic strip; he followed it with Dream of the Rarebit Fiend later in 1904, and his best-known strip Little Nemo in 1905.
Overview
The strip followed a simple concept: each week, little Sammy would sneeze (with the onomatopoeia "Chow!"), and his powerful sneeze would wreak havoc with his surroundings. His sneeze would build up until its release in the second-to-last panel, and in the last panel he would suffer the consequences—for instance, being driven away by one of his victims. His sneeze was powerful enough that it could even destroy the strip's panel borders.
Though the story of a mischievous boy and the trouble he caused was typical of the comic strips of the day, the artwork displayed an attention to detail McCay was known for. The backgrounds would remain the same from panel to panel, while passersby would unwittingly pass Sammy during his buildup. McCay took the visual ideas he experimented with in Little Sammy Sneeze and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (also 1904) and more fully explored them when he began Little Nemo in Slumberland the following year.
Style
The strip was almost always laid out in the same rigid six-panel grid; Sammy's sneeze would build in the first four panels to a release in the fifth, and was met with the consequences in the sixth. This is in contrast to the great variety of layouts displayed in McCay's earlier strip The Jungle Imps, and later much more prominently in Little Nemo. Though not to the degree applied to Little Nemo, McCay's backgrounds were heavily detailed, and he drew monotonous, repetitive images with great accuracy. McCay later applied these skills to his animation work. Sammy was inarticulate, making little more than mouth noises; the adults around him conversed, but in a monotonous manner that did not invite careful reading.
Publishing history
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Little Sammy Sneeze' began on 24 July, 1904, in the New York Herald, where McCay had joined the staff in 1903. It ran in color until partway through 1905, and came to an end 9 December, 1906. The Herald took advantage of the popularity of the strip by releasing a 72-page book collection in 1905.
Sunday Press Books released a deluxe 11 in × 16 in (28 cm × 41 cm) landscape-format hardcover volume called Little Sammy Sneeze: The Complete Color Sunday Comics 1904-1905 in 2007. On the reverse of each Sammy Sneeze page was printed a non-Sammy Sneeze strip—the complete run of McCay's The Story of Hungry Henrietta, as well as selections from John Prentiss Benson's The Woozlebeasts, and Gustave Verbeek's The Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo and The Terrors of the Tiny Tads. These bonus strips appeared in monochrome to Sammy Sneeze's color, as they would have at the time when newspapers normally printed color on only one side of the page.
Legacy
After a two-and-a-half-year run, McCay dropped the strip, while continuing to work on Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, Pilgrim's Progress, and his best-known work, Little Nemo. It has since mostly been remembered as a precursor to McCay's better-known strips, receiving little attention itself outside of a few key strips. The strip's concept was later picked up by the creators of characters such as Sneezly Seal and Li'l Sneezer.
Scott Bukatman and Thierry Smolderen saw the monotony of Sammy Sneeze as an attempt by McCay at parody—one that, in Smolderen's words, "chuckles at the absurdity of ... doing the same thing ad nauseam". Noah Berlatsky objected to the idea, calling the strip "excessive and infantile, linked, not to a sense of irony, but a sense of wonder", which he compared to the "eternal appetite of infancy" that G. K. Chesterton attributed to the Christian God in Orthodoxy (1908).
References
- ^ Harvey 1994, p. 27; Markstein 2005.
- Telotte 2010, p. 57.
- Gardner 2012, p. 40.
- ^ Harvey 1994, p. 28.
- Harvey 1994, p. 34.
- ^ Roeder 2013, p. 18.
- ^ Berlatsky 2008, p. 197.
- Berlatsky 2008, p. 196.
- ^ McCulloch 2007.
- ^ Markstein 2005.
- Bukatman 2012, p. 40.
- Smolderen 2014, p. 150.
Works cited
- Berlatsky, Noah (October 2008). "Eternal Appetite". The Comics Journal (292): 196–199.
{{cite journal}}: Invalid|ref=harv(help) - Bukatman, Scott (2012). The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-26571-4.
{{cite book}}: Invalid|ref=harv(help) - Gardner, Jared (2012). Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-8178-7.
{{cite book}}: Invalid|ref=harv(help) - Harvey, Robert C. (1994). The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-0-87805-674-3.
{{cite book}}: Invalid|ref=harv(help) - Markstein, Don (2005). "Little Sammy Sneeze". Don Markstein's Toonopedia. Retrieved 2012-06-28.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link) - McCulloch, Joe (2007-12-28). "My Life is Choked with Comics #15 – Little Sammy Sneeze: The Complete Color Sunday Comics 1904-1905". Savage Critic. Retrieved 2012-06-27.
{{cite web}}: External link in|publisher=|ref=harv(help) - Roeder, Katherine (2013). Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-61703-960-7.
{{cite book}}: Invalid|ref=harv(help) - Smolderen, Thierry (2014). The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-61703-149-6.
{{cite book}}: Invalid|ref=harv(help) - Telotte, J. P. (2010). Animating Space: From Mickey to Wall-E. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-2586-2. Retrieved 2012-06-25.
{{cite book}}: Invalid|ref=harv(help)
See Also
- Maresca, Peter (2007). Little Sammy Sneeze. Sunday Press Books. ISBN 978-0-9768885-4-3.
External links
Media related to Little Sammy Sneeze at Wikimedia Commons- Barnacle Press: Little Sammy Sneeze
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