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.
In contrast to the imaginative layouts of Little Nemo, Sammy Sneeze was confined to a rigid grid and follwoed a strict formula: Sammy's sneeze would build frame by frame, contorting his face until in the second to last panel he released a disatrous sneeze. In the closing panel he suffered the consequences—often a kick in the rear. McCay targeted middle-class pretensions such as consumerism and squeemishness over bodily functions, while reaffirming the order of this world by ensuring that Sammy suffered the consequences of his impropriety.
McCay's artwork was finely detailed and highly accurate in its persistent repetition. He delved into modernist experimentation, shattering fourth walls and even the strip's panel borders. The panel-by-panel buildup displayed McCay's concern with depicting motion, a concern that was to culminate in his pioneering animated films of the 1910s, such as Gertie the Dinosaur (1914).
Premise
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. In the last panel he would suffer the consequencesVorlage:Sfnm—being driven away by one of his victims,Vorlage:Sfnm or often being kicked in the rear.Vorlage:Sfn
Background
Winsor McCay had worked in dime museums in Cincinnati from 1891, where he drew posters and advertisements.Vorlage:Sfn McCay's ability to draw quickly with great accuracy drew crowds when he painted advertisements in public.Vorlage:Sfn He began working as a newspaper cartoonist full-time in 1898, while freelancing on the side for humor magazines.Vorlage:Sfn McCay moved to New York City in 1903 to work for the New York Herald,Vorlage:Sfn leaving behind his first comic strip, A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle.Vorlage:Sfn From January 1904 he tried his and at a number of other short-lived strips, before finding popular succes with Sammy Sneeze that July.Vorlage:Sfn
McCay was noted not only for his exceptional drafting skills, but also his remarkable prolificity. In addition to his editorial cartoonig, in 1905 he was producing five regular comic strips: Little Sammy Sneeze, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, Little Nemo in Slumberland, Hungry Henrietta, and A Pilgrim's Progress.Vorlage:Sfn
Style and analysis
The strip was almost always laid out in a rigid 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 panel sizes and layouts displayed in McCay's earlier strip The Jungle Imps, and later much more prominently in Little Nemo.Vorlage:Sfn 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.Vorlage:Sfn 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.Vorlage:Sfn
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.Vorlage:Sfn McCay took the visual ideas he experimented with in Little Sammy Sneeze and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (also 1904Vorlage:Sfn) and more fully explored them when he began Little Nemo in Slumberland the following year.Vorlage:Sfn
- Examples of Little Sammy Sneeze
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Sammy destroys his panel borders (September 24, 1905) -
Sammy's genteel dress was a source of humor (April 16, 1905)
While the technical dexterity Little Nemo draws the greatest share of attention among McCay's works, Katherine Roeder finds the formally lower-key Sammy Sneeze "tested the limits of visual representation and demonstrated the comic strip's potential as a vehicle for modernist experimentation".Vorlage:Sfn McCay was fond of breaking the fourth wall.Vorlage:Sfn A well-known example is the September 24, 1905, episode: the gag unfolds according to formula, culminating in the destruction of the very panel borders of the comic strip itself.Vorlage:Sfn The strip may pay homage to the Fred Ott's Sneeze—a filmstrip of the progression of a man sneezing. The photographs appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1884 and were well known. As in the film, and unusual for the comic strip, the September 24 strip has a closeup of the sneezer against a blank background, and Sammy's gestures echo those of Ott.Vorlage:Sfn
McCay was concerned with depicting the seldom-perceived minutiae of movement, though his was not the scientific curiosity of chronophotographers Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Georges Demenÿ. McCay emphasizes the lack of order, the irrational unpredictability of the human body. McCay's concern was to culminate in his pioneering animated films such as Gertie the Dinosaur (1914).Vorlage:Sfn
Though the story of mischievous children and the trouble they caused was typical of the comic strips of the day.Vorlage:Sfn In contrast to such characters in other popular strips such as The Katzenjammer Kids and Buster Brown, the havoc Sammy wreaked was unintentional. To Katherine Roeder, the humor at the expense of both the adults and the child likely appealed to a broad range of readers, and may have broadened the appeal of comic strips to conservative middle-class audineces. These audiences may have seen the inevitable consequences for Sammy as a restoration of a natural social order, one that was left rent asunder in other comic strips.Vorlage:Sfn
Sammy is given an unappealing character design and personality, with dull features and expression that do not invite the reader's sympathy;Vorlage:Sfn his character is never developed.Vorlage:Sfn Similar to Buster Brown, Sammy dresses in a dress shirt, lace collar, and cravat. This style associated with middle-class aspirations and popularized toward the end of the 19th century in the wake of the success of Little Lord Fauntleroy. By the time Sammy Sneeze had begun the style was a subject of ridicule; in an age where respectable society went to lengths to avoid drawing attention to bodily functions, it emphasized the humorous contortions of Sammy's face as he built up toward his sneeze.Vorlage:Sfn His sneeze could also tear down other symbols of the middle-class, such as an expansive department store display of goods at Christmas.Vorlage:Sfn
The strip's header declared to each side of the title "He just simply couldn't stop" and "He never knew when it was coming", and never strayed from the basic formula of build-up, release, and consequence. McCay was to make use of such framing devices throughout his career, as in Little Nemo where the reader could rely on the protagonist awaking in the closing panel each week.Vorlage:Sfn Scott BukatmanVorlage:Sfn and Thierry Smolderen saw the monotony of Sammy Sneeze as an attempt by McCay at parodyVorlage:Sfn—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).Vorlage:Sfn
Publication 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.Vorlage:Sfnm It ran in color until partway through 1905, and came to an end 9 December, 1906.Vorlage:Sfn In 1906, a compilation volume of the strips appeared—not only in the United Staes, but in France where the Heralds publisher James Gordon Bennett, Jr. was based.Vorlage:Efn Sammy was one of the earliest American strips to appear in Europe.Vorlage:Sfn
Sunday Press Books released a deluxe Vorlage:Convert 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 Sneezes color, as they would have at the time when newspapers normally printed color on only one side of the page.Vorlage:Sfn
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.Vorlage:Sfn 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.Vorlage:Sfn The strip's concept was later picked up by the creators of characters such as Sneezly Seal and Li'l Sneezer.Vorlage:Sfn
Notes
References
Works cited
- Noah Berlatsky: Eternal Appetite. In: The Comics Journal. Nr. 292, Oktober 2008, S. 196–199 (hoodedutilitarian.com).
- Scott Bukatman: The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit. University of California Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-520-26571-4 (google.com).
- Vorlage:Cite isbn
- Jared Gardner: Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-8047-8178-7 (google.com).
- Robert C. Harvey: The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History. University Press of Mississippi, 1994, ISBN 978-0-87805-674-3 (google.com).
- Don Markstein: Little Sammy Sneeze. Don Markstein's Toonopedia, 2005, abgerufen am 28. Juni 2012.
- Joe McCulloch: My Life is Choked with Comics #15 – Little Sammy Sneeze: The Complete Color Sunday Comics 1904-1905. Savage Critic, 28. Dezember 2007, abgerufen am 27. Juni 2012.
- Katherine Roeder: Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay. University Press of Mississippi, 2013, ISBN 978-1-61703-960-7 (google.com).
- Thierry Smolderen: The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay. University Press of Mississippi, 2014, ISBN 978-1-61703-149-6 (google.com).
- J. P. Telotte: Animating Space: From Mickey to Wall-E. University Press of Kentucky, 2010, ISBN 978-0-8131-2586-2 (google.com [abgerufen am 25. Juni 2012]).
See Also
- Peter Maresca: Little Sammy Sneeze. Sunday Press Books, 2007, ISBN 978-0-9768885-4-3.
