A bidding war between Joseph Pulitzer and William R. Hearst to acquire The Yellow Kid comic strip character would inspire the term “yellow journalism,” referring to the industry’s breathless pursuit of sensationalism.
A year after curtailing Winsor’s vaudeville appearances, Hearst began to change his low opinion of animation. John Bray’s and Raoul Barré’s fledgling studios had begun releasing regular series of animated cartoons, some based on newspaper comics, and Hearst realized how animation could boost the popularity of his own strips, which included Krazy Kat, Happy Hooligan, and the Katzenjammer Kids. In 1915, Hearst started his own animation studio, International Film Service (IFS), and hired one of Barré’s animators, Gregory La Cava, to run it. The cartoons weren’t particularly well drawn and the studio ultimately lost money, but this didn’t matter to Hearst so long as they increased the popularity of his newspaper comics and helped sell papers. Losses were written off as an advertising expense. The studio was shuttered a few years later, after Hearst decided it was no longer worth the effort.
McCay never worked for IFS. A cartoonist of his skills was far more valuable at the newspaper. Nor would he have wanted to work there; the work primarily consisted of simple line drawings and gag humor, and wasn’t up to McCay’s level. Instead, he continued toiling away on artwork for Arthur Brisbane’s ghastly columns. But his thoughts remained on animation and dreaming up his next big project.
Winsor McCay opened his morning newspaper on May 7, 1915, to read that a German U-boat had torpedoed the British ocean liner Lusitania. The ship sank to the bottom of the Atlantic in eighteen minutes, its four giant smokestacks hissing and sputtering as they slipped underneath the sea. No pictures of the tragic sinking existed; there were images only of the aftermath: bloated bodies, tangled in seaweed, washing up on the shores of Ireland, many of them children.
For days, talk of the sinking filled New York, rattling the windows of cafés and diners. Americans wondered when they would get involved in the war. Speculation filled the newspapers but was noticeably absent from one man’s papers: those of William Randolph Hearst, a staunch isolationist. This bothered McCay, who thought the German aggression needed to be confronted. The only country Hearst did support attacking was Mexico, but this was probably only because Pancho Villa had once looted Hearst’s vacation house in Chihuahua, and Hearst likely wanted revenge. Hearst certainly didn’t want to enter a war to assist the British, whom his papers still sometimes referred to as “redcoats.” Two days after the Lusitania sank, Arthur Brisbane argued that the ship “was properly a spoil of war, subject to attack and destruction under the accepted rules of civilized warfare.”
McCay was still working for Brisbane, providing illustrations for his off-kilter rants. The drudgery was wearing on him, making his work flabby and less lively. He often disagreed with Brisbane and particularly disagreed with him about the Lusitania.
Despite his being in the rotten position of having to work for an unpleasant boss, Winsor’s situation was slowly improving. Hearst had loosened his moratorium on cartoonists holding side jobs, allowing McCay to take Gertie the Dinosaur back on the vaudeville circuit, although with some restriction on how much he could travel. Back in the saddle, he began thinking about new animation projects to tackle, his thoughts constantly returning to the sinking of the Lusitania. Since no photographs had captured the dramatic moment, a cartoon of it might help people better realize war’s human cost.
In July 1916, McCay was in Detroit showing his cartoons at vaudeville theaters when he announced his next project. “Imagine how effective would be cherubs that actually fly and Bonheur horses that gallop and Whistler rivers that flow!” he told a gaggle of reporters, reminding them of animation’s grand possibilities. Whenever he talked about the new art form, he liked referencing fine art, the kind of art done on canvas with oil paint. He then reminded the reporters of the ways animation was evolving, thanks to many innovations introduced by men like John Bray and Raoul Barré. McCay explained that he would be using some of those innovations in his next project. “I am now working on a film which will show the sinking of the Lusitania,” he announced. Then he added a dramatic flourish: “The film will revolutionize cartoon movies.”
McCay needed two years to make The Sinking of the Lusitania. He had help from his assistant, John Fitzsimmons, and another friend, William Apthorp Adams, who was a descendant of John Adams and one of Winsor’s cartoonist pals from his Cincinnati days. Because of McCay’s newspaper duties, the men could only work part-time and the task quickly became daunting. It required approximately 25,000 separate drawings even though the film was only a little over ten minutes long. To get the atmospheric effects he wanted, McCay experimented with elaborate shading techniques and ink washes to capture the complicated movements of drifting smoke and churning water. Each frame was its own little painting.
A signed cel from Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918).
“Winsor McCay’s Blood Stirring Pen Picture—the World’s Only Record of the Crime that Shocked Humanity!” the movie poster read when the film debuted in July 1918. Other animators were awed by how the ink washes had given it an impressionistic effect, while fine cross-hatching and intentional splatters added to its impact by providing the feel of a newsreel documentary. On-screen, the Lusitania glided silently across the black water under a silver crescent of moonlight; the breathtaking visuals, alternating shots of close-ups and pans, done at varying speeds, were far more advanced than the camera work of much live-action cinema being done then. After taking the audience underwater to glimpse fish darting away from the bubbly wake of the German torpedoes, McCay ended with images of the passengers’ heads bobbing on the waves. For the finale, a mother slips beneath the water, struggling to push her infant to the surface.
The Sinking of the Lusitania was instantly deemed a masterpiece, although it didn’t have the full cultural impact McCay had wanted. He originally envisioned it as a call to arms, inspiring Americans to join the war in Europe, but millions of American soldiers were already fighting in France by the time the cartoon finally debuted. Thus, The Sinking of the Lusitania served more as a memorial, solemn and brooding, rather than as a battle cry. It also set a high-water mark for other animators to reach; its movie poster boasted that it was “the picture that will never have a competitor!”
Chapter 6
“This Place Is Full of Sharks”
In 1914, William Marriner, a notoriously volatile cartoonist working for the McClure newspaper syndicate, committed suicide by lighting his house on fire and refusing to leave. As a result, the fate of Marriner’s comic strip, Sambo and His Funny Noises, was uncertain. Originally based on a book by Helen Bannerman, The Story of Little Black Sambo, the strip was an unfortunate example of the era’s casual racism—its main character exists mainly to mock African-American dialects (“Dere ain’t no room on dis earth fo’ dem white boys an’ me!”)—but was nevertheless quite popular. As Marriner’s affairs were sorted out, the strip was taken over by his former assistant, Patrick Sullivan, who immediately began seeking ways to boost its popularity. Intrigued by the potential of animation, he decided to adapt it into a cartoon.
But first he would need to learn how to animate. Knocking on the doors of New York’s few fledgling animation studios, he began asking for a job.
Australian by birth and twenty-nine years old, Sullivan had few qualities recommending him to an employer, although his résumé was no doubt interesting. It included a position