Every night somebody eats the cheese toast. Every night they pay the price. Winsor McCay's adult nightmare strip — one strip per day, cycling through the archive.
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend began on September 10, 1904 in the New York Evening Telegram — and it was unlike anything being published in American newspapers at the time. Each strip followed the same elegant formula: an ordinary person eats Welsh rarebit before bed, falls asleep, and is immediately hurled into a nightmare of escalating, surreal terror. The final panel always shows them waking up, sweaty and shaken, cursing the cheese toast.
There are no recurring characters. No continuity. Every strip is its own sealed nightmare — a new dreamer, a new horror, a new awakening. The dreams expose the raw, unflattering inner lives of ordinary people: social embarrassment, fear of death, paranoia, guilt, desire, and the particular dread of losing one's mind. McCay aimed this squarely at adults, in deliberate contrast to the warm fantasy of his better-known Little Nemo strips.
The strip ran until 1911, reappeared briefly in 1913 under alternate titles like Midsummer Day Dreams and It Was Only a Dream, and was revived again from 1923 to 1925 as Rarebit Reveries. A first collection of 61 strips was published in 1905 by Frederick A. Stokes — one of the earliest comic strip collections ever assembled.
McCay was drawing the unconscious mind on paper a full generation before the Surrealists made it a movement. Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams appeared in 1899 — and McCay's strips, through a chain of influence, actually ended up cited in a later edition of Freud's book. A Hungarian artist heavily inspired by Rarebit Fiend created a comic that was passed directly to Freud by a psychoanalyst colleague. McCay's nightmares became part of the scientific literature of dreams.
The strip also invented things that cinema and pop culture would spend the next century catching up to. A strip about a man growing to enormous size and destroying a city predates King Kong and Godzilla by decades. McCay himself adapted the strip into pioneering animated films, including How a Mosquito Operates (1912) and three more in 1921 — among the earliest examples of what animation could do beyond simple movement.
Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, Maurice Sendak, and Moebius all cited McCay as a foundational influence. The Winsor McCay Award — animation's lifetime achievement honor — has been given since 1972 in his name. And yet outside of comics historians and animation scholars, he remains criminally underknown.
Zenas Winsor McCay was born somewhere between 1866 and 1871 — he was characteristically vague about the year — in Spring Lake, Michigan. He spent his early career making posters for dime museums and illustrating newspapers, joining the New York Herald in 1903. By the time he launched Rarebit Fiend in 1904, he was already one of the fastest and most technically accomplished cartoonists in America.
He was a prodigy in every medium he touched. His vaudeville act involved drawing elaborate full-color illustrations live on stage at superhuman speed while an orchestra played. His comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, which debuted in 1905, is still considered one of the greatest achievements in the history of the form — full-page Sunday color spreads with architectural precision, Art Nouveau linework, and genuine emotional depth.
In 1914, his animated short Gertie the Dinosaur set the standard that Walt Disney and every animator after him would spend careers trying to match. McCay died in 1934. The pen name "Silas" — which he used on Rarebit Fiend due to contract restrictions — came from an old man he'd seen driving a garbage cart outside the Herald offices.
McCay signed Rarebit Fiend as "Silas" because his contract with the New York Herald prohibited him from using his real name on work published by the rival Evening Telegram. He picked the name from an actual person — an old man he observed driving a garbage cart past the Herald building. That detail alone says everything about McCay's eye for the world around him.
There is a theory, advanced by comics historian Paul Gravett, that the strip served as a form of art therapy. McCay's younger brother Arthur had been committed to an asylum when Winsor was thirty years old. The recurring device of blaming each nightmare on the rarebit — externalizing the source of horror, insisting it was just the food — may have been McCay's way of managing his own fear that the same mental unraveling could happen to him. He drew the nightmares out and contained them on the page, and then blamed the cheese.
Science fiction pioneer Hugo Gernsback — who later founded the first dedicated sci-fi magazine and gave his name to the Hugo Awards — was among the readers who submitted dream ideas to McCay for the strip. McCay acknowledged accepted submissions directly in print, beside his Silas signature.