Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend

This is the title-page illustration for Winsor McCay's collected Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, published by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. The central image shows a grotesque, melting figure — a dreamer dissolving into cascading, drapery-like folds of flesh — rendered in McCay's characteristic Art Nouveau linework, fluid and unsettling against a stark black ground. The strip, which McCay drew pseudonymously as 'Silas,' ran in the Evening Telegram beginning 1904: each episode follows an ordinary person through a nightmare blamed on Welsh rarebit eaten too late at night. McCay's innovation was psychological interiority — the comic strip as dream logic — anticipating Little Nemo and establishing the page as a space where sequential art could carry genuine visual dread rather than slapstick alone.