Winsor McCay at the Drawing Board

Cliff Sterrett renders fellow cartoonist Winsor McCay as a hunched, hat-wearing figure perched on a stool, cigarette clenched between his teeth, bent furiously over a drafting table outfitted with a T-square and an ink bottle. Smoke curls upward into phantasmal, vaguely monstrous shapes — a wry visual joke about McCay's hallucinatory imagination. The drafting hardware is rendered with affectionate precision. This peer-to-peer caricature appeared just as newspaper art pages were codifying the visual language — recurring characters, sequential panels, expressive linework — that would migrate directly into the comic book format of the late 1930s. McCay's *Little Nemo* had launched only two years earlier; Sterrett himself would debut *Polly and Her Pals* four years hence. Two architects of the form, caught in the same moment.