Where do we even start to highlight the wicked strangeness of Winsor McCay’s “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend?” The master comics artist drew over 800 nightmares in the first decade of the 20th Century, and most of them include startling examples of his surrealist imagination like the above. The conceit was simple. A normal scene in the opening panel quickly devolves into some bent reality: giant insects sucking a man’s forehead; a gent sneezing his head into the street; various limbs expanding to absurd sizes; people exploding willy nilly; or the characters themselves dissembling or penetrating the cartoon panels themselves. And it all ends in a final panel of the man or woman involved waking up and cursing the rich melted cheese dish (“Rarebit”) that prompted the nightmare.

Gigantism, body dysmorphia, dismemberment and crumbling structures seemed to be McCay’s dominant tropes. One has to imagine that the artist himself, who drew incessantly and with such painstaking detail and precision, understood the nature of obsession. That he projected these nightmares onto an emerging American middle class of bureaucrats, managers, salespeople, city landscapes and technologies just begs for richer cultural analysis. I’ll spare you all of that. For now, take these exemplary panels as the latest edition of our Weekly Weird. More on McCay and his urban surrealism here.

One of my favorite “Fiends” is among the handful of color versions.