Winsor McCay Centaurs
Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.
Winsor McCay was the creator of the surrealist newspaper comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, a beautiful, eye-opening classic that ran from 1905 to 1914 and has influenced me not a little. It can be had in glorious full-color reprints from los eeenternets for colossal amounts of money, or, the way I got it, from la biblioteca. A few strips are available online, like this great one from wikimedia commons. Ray Bradbury did a film adaptation in the ’90s, and there was an 8-bit Nintendo game I rented once when I was 11….
But anyway. Here, courtesy of Paul DiFillipo, is a little-known animation fragment McCay did, featuring some centaurs frolicking in a forest to tasteful piano music:
[Inferior4+1]: Winsor McCay’s Centaurs
Note the well-endowed female centaur, and then note the comment below from John Crowley about the apocryphality of said endowedness, being as how there were no female centaurs in greek myth. Woo Crowley!
Predictably, my favorite part comes around the 0:44 mark, when the strapping young male centaur heartthrob, for no apparent reason, throws a rock at a passing albatross and kills it.