McCay by Thierry Smolderen and Jean-Philippe Bramanti

I don't know why creators - people who make up their own ideas out of their own heads and often are indignant at the idea that those ideas came from somewhere else (Schenectady, for example) - are also the ones who often tell stories that are entirely "here's the real, secret reason behind this other creator's biggest work!" 

It might just be that I'm talking about different people, which is always the risk: "creators" is a big bucket, and they don't think anywhere near alike. But you would think that a class of people who are often annoyed by the "where do you get your ideas?" question would be somewhat more reticent to spin complex tales of "here's how this guy got his ideas." You would think, but you would be wrong, because it happens a lot.

McCay is a secret history of Winsor McCay, the pioneering American cartoonist and animator, by the French team of Thierry Smolderen (script) and Jean-Philippe Bramanti (art). As far as I can tell, this two-hundred-page story was originally a four-volume series, starting in the late Nineties, then collected in a single French edition sometime in the Teens and finally translated by Edward Gauvin for this very handsome oversized single-volume English edition in 2017.

It starts in 1889, with McCay an art student in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and skips forward through his life, ending with a coda in 1914. The back cover copy gives the sketch - in 1889, McCay met "Silas the anarchist" and "Professor Hinton, the renowned British mathematician and fourth-dimensional specialist" and what they taught him, and events they sparked, will play out, mostly twenty years later.

This is a thriller, so it's mostly about chasing murderers through the fourth dimension and very little about being a working cartoonist in the dawn of the modern era. I found that faintly disappointing: the world has a lot of thrillers and many fewer good books about the life of creative people. But the point of criticism is to talk about what a thing is, and not what it could have been.

Smolderen weaves a lot of details of McCay's life into the narrative - I gather that the original publications had extensive notes about how McCay actually knew Houdini and Hearst and all the others, and how these fictional events could have fit into what's known of his life - and keeps it from being just a thriller. It's not quite as philosophical as I think he wanted it to be, but it is a relatively thoughtful and nuanced thriller.

And Bramanti delivers his art in a moody, usually dark style - I think all watercolors, all painted - which occasionally made it difficult for me to tell which character was which (but that may be a Me Issue). It's visually impressive, and also looks nothing like McCay's own detailed linework, which is doubly interesting.

I was hoping for something deeper than "stopping the fourth dimensional murderer!" but the world, and other people's fictions, do not follow our hopes. McCay is well-constructed and moodily beautiful and full of strong moments; it's a neat book for anyone who knows who Winsor McCay is and is willing to read a moderately outré story based on his life.