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''Dream of the Rarebit Fiend'' was a newspaper comic strip by American cartoonist Winsor McCay, begun September 10, 1904. As in McCay's signature strip, ''Little Nemo'', the strip depicted fantastic bizarre dreams. It was McCay's second successful strip, after ''Little Sammy Sneeze'' secured him a position on the cartoon staff of the ''New York Herald''. ''Rarebit Fiend'' was printed in the ''Evening Telegram'', a newspaper published by the ''Herald''. For contractual reasons, McCay signed the strip with the pen name "Silas". The strip had no continuity or recurring characters. Instead, it had a recurring theme: a character would have a nightmare or other bizarre dream, usually after eating a Welsh rarebit—a cheese-on-toast dish. The character would awaken from the dream in the closing panel, regretting having eaten the rarebit. The dreams often revealed unflattering sides of the dreamers' psyches—their phobias, hypocrisies, discomforts, and dark fantasies. This was in great contrast to the colorful, childlike fantasy dreams in ''Little Nemo''. The strip is mostly recognized as an adult-oriented precursor to ''Nemo''. The popularity of ''Rarebit Fiend'' and ''Nemo'' led to McCay being hired for William Randolph Hearst's chain of newspapers with a star's salary. His editor there thought McCay's highly skilled cartooning "serious, not funny", and had McCay give up comic strips in favor of editorial cartooning. The strip was revived 1923–1925 as ''Rarebit Reveries'', though few examples have survived. ''Rarebit Fiend'' was the inspiration for a number of films, including Edwin S. Porter's live-action ''Dream of a Rarebit Fiend'' in 1906, and four pioneering animated films by McCay himself: ''How a Mosquito Operates'' in 1912, and 1921's ''Bug Vaudeville'', ''The Pet'', and ''The Flying House''. The strip is said to have anticipated a number of recurring ideas in popular culture, such as giant characters damaging cities—as later popularized by ''King Kong'' and ''Godzilla''. ==Overview== Winsor McCay first produced the hallucinogenic ''Dream of the Rarebit Fiend'' in 1904, a year before the dream romps of his ''Little Nemo'' and a full generation before the artists of the Surrealist movement unleashed the subconscious on the public. The strip had no recurring characters, but followed one theme: after eating a Welsh rarebit, the day's protagonist would be subject to the darker side of his or her psyche. Typically, the strip would begin with an absurd situation, which progressively became more absurd until the Fiend—the dreamer—awakened in the final panel. Some situations were merely silly: elephants falling from the ceiling, or two women's mink coats having a fight. Other times, they could be more disturbing: characters finding themselves dismembered, buried alive from a first-person perspective or a child's mother being planted and becoming a tree. In some strips, the Fiend was a spectator, watching fantastic or horrible things happen to someone close to themself. The typically bourgeois, urban protagonists were often subjected to fears of public humiliation or loss of social esteem or respectability. ''Rarebit Fiend'' was the only of McCay's strips in which he approached social or political topics, or dealt with contemporary life. He addressed religious leaders, alcoholism, homelessness, political speeches, suicide, fashion, and other topics, unlike in his other strips, which had fantasy or seemingly vague, timeless backgrounds. The strip had a number of references to contemporary events, such as the 1904 election of Theodore Roosevelt; the recently built Flatiron Building (1902) and St. Regis Hotel (1904) in New York City; and the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War. The rarebit, a dish typically made with rich cheese thinned with ale, and served melted on toast with cayenne and mustard mixed in, was used despite its innocuousness—according to cultural theorist Scott Bukatman, it was not the sort of dish a person would associate with having nightmares. McCay's most famous character, Little Nemo, was prefigured in the first year of ''Dream of the Rarebit Fiend'', on December 10, 1904. In 1905, McCay had Nemo appear in his own strip in the ''New York Herald''. In comparison to that better-known strip, the artwork of the ''Rarebit Fiend'' strips had minimal backgrounds, and were usually done from a fixed perspective, with the main characters often in a fixed position. The content of ''Rarebit Fiend'' played a much bigger role than it did in ''Little Nemo'', whose focus was on beautiful visuals. The stories were self-contained, whereas the ''Nemo'' story continued from week to week. The dreams in ''Nemo'' were aimed at children, but ''Rarebit Fiend'' had adult-oriented subjects—social embarrassment, fear of dying or going insane, and so on. Some of the dreams in both strips were wish-fulfillment fantasies. Unlike most comic strips from the time, ''Rarebit Fiend'' is not humorous or escapist. The strips highlight readers' darker selves—hypocrisies, deceitfulness, phobias, and discomfort. They offer often biting social commentary, and marital, money, and religious matters are shown in a negative light. McCay was interested in pushing formal boundaries, and playful self-referentiality plays a role in many of the strips; characters sometimes referred to McCay's alter-ego "Silas", or to the reader. Though frequent in ''Rarebit Fiend'', this self-referentiality does not appear in McCay's other strips. In contrast to the skilled artwork, the lettering in the dialogue balloons, as in McCay's other work, was awkward and could approach illegibility, especially in reproductions, where the artwork was normally greatly reduced in size. McCay seemed to show little regard for the dialogue balloons, their content, and their placement in the visual composition. They tended to contain repetitive monologues expressing the increasing distress of the speakers, and showed that McCay's gift was in the visual and not the verbal. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Dream of the Rarebit Fiend」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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