Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald, and His Moving Comics
You’re practically
vibrating.
“Am I, darling?”
Like an unsteady hand.
“How charming.”
Gertie agrees.
Rarity wrapped the creature’s face in as wide a hug as she could manage. She almost got round her whole cheek. Gertie rumbled in a friendly manner, and raised her head, and Rarity hung on for a second, two, before falling back on her rear. Gertie shook her head amusedly. Rarity grinned. “I feel alive!” she explained. “Alive as I have not felt, I suspect, for a long, long time.”
Does this have to do
with dreaming?
“Dreaming!” said Rarity. “Why, yes, I suppose in a way it does.”
You are being unusually
mysterious.
“Hah! I’m allowed to be, am I not? Let me say just this, then: I have decided to give up something I’ve been holding on to for far too long, and I feel about twenty years younger.” Gertie lowered her head quizzically, nosing at her flank. Rarity rubbed her neck in just the spot she knew the dinosaurus loved to scratch. “Gertie knows what I’m talking about, don’t you, girl?”
Give up?
The voice sounded, for perhaps the first time, almost alarmed.
“Why, yes. All right, if you must know...” And as she rattled through an explanation of events, all leading up to her little dinnertime announcement, the feeling began to creep over her that the voice knew a lot of it already.
“So,” she finished, “I’m stepping away. Giving it up! No more dresses, suits, soirées, no more fancy jackets and gemstones! Farewell to fashion! Good-bye!”
I see.
“You know,” said Rarity, “I think – no offence to this place, of course, it’s really rather lovely – I’m actually looking forward to waking up! Dreading it, of course,” she added quickly, “but, really...looking forward to it, as well.”
There was a silence. Gertie idly scratched her chin.
Gertie will now show that
she isn’t afraid of me and
take me for a ride.
Rarity frowned. “What—”
Gertie vanished. To where, exactly, Rarity wasn’t sure. To some other space, she gathered, some world beyond the boundaries of this one. To waking-world, perhaps, or a world further yet. All was silent, all was still – without Gertie in it, she noticed, suddenly, nothing in this world moved at all. And then...
Stepping back in from wherever she had disappeared to, life returned. Slow-bobbing neck, great ponderous feet, a graceful, agile tail. Something small and black and very thin was standing on her back, waving a whip in a rather distracted manner. “Hello!” came the voice, very distantly, that Rarity recognised. She stared. “Delighted to meet you at last,” he said, as they came closer.
Years of careful repetition kicked in automatically. “The pleasure’s all mine!” she managed. “I...hmh, forgive me. I can’t make you out very well up there, and I’m just now realising I have absolutely no idea what to call you!”
“Call me?” he asked. “Hold on...” He said something else that Rarity couldn’t quite make out, and Gertie’s huge eyes rolled round, but she nodded, and picked the gangly fellow off her back, depositing him clumsily on the ground. The thing picked itself up, shook a limb at Gertie, and turned back to her. “Hello, Rarity,” he said, again, and Rarity realised that the little pale ball at the very top was his head. “I’m Winsor,” he said, cheerfully. “Winsor McCay. I’m a human. And an animator! I draw pictures and make them come to life.”
“A...magician?” she asked.
“A dreamer,” he answered. “Come, let me tell you a story.”
Windor McCay was born in 1871 (he said, with a wink), and spent his life drawing pictures for various magazines. His real passion, though, was animation. He made ten films: ten inventions. “Gertie here, well, she was one of them.” All this was starting to sound like a bit too much for Rarity, especially the parts about bringing Gertie to life – sounding like the sort of Forbidden Knowledge Twilight was always running after – until he told her, eventually, that he stopped animating.
“You grew out of it?” Rarity asked.
“Worse,” he said, with a sad sort of smile. “It grew out of me. All that...corporate interest.”
“Oh, yes,” said Rarity, darkly. “Yes, we’re well acquainted.”
“No doubt,” he said, still smiling. “But here’s what happened next...” And he described to her how he gave it up: sold it, in fact, his ability to keep going, keep bringing his pictures to life.
“They paid me well for it,” he said, grimly. “I could hardly complain.”
One day, not much long after, he’d woken up, and been unable to draw entirely. “Paralysed. Completely. My right arm: gone. Couldn’t draw a thing.”
“Oh, no!” gasped Rarity. “What happened then?”
“Then?” he let out a chuckle dark and bitter as old coffee. “Why, then I died.”
“Oh.” He didn't look much like a ghost, thought Rarity, but she kept the opinion to herself. “I'm sorry.”
“Yes. I am, too,” he said, wryly. “It was a nice funeral, though. Well-attended.”
Rarity searched for something to say. She hadn't had a lot of experience with that sort of thing. “Ah. Well, at least you must have looked the part. It's a fine outfit. Very fine. I'm glad to see your species wears clothes!”
“Thank you!” he laughed. “Yes, we're almost as fond of them as you ponies.”
“Although, mmn.” Rarity bit her lip, considering. “If I could be allowed to make just one or two adjustments...”
He beamed. “Please! Adjust away. This is dreamland, after all.” He looked down a moment later at his new suit: a rich, dark purple, completely encrusted with gems. “Marvellous!”
“Mmn, yes, I think so, too. Rather good, actually, if I do say so myself.”
He smiled, and then reached down, taking her hoof very seriously. “Don’t let them win,” he told her. “It isn’t worth it.”
“Pardon?” Rarity asked. “I'm not sure what you...”
“Don’t give it to them. We dreamers need our dreams to keep on going.”
And he bent to kiss her hoof. “Good-bye. It’s been...transformystic.”
He let her go, and Gertie picked him up and placed him on her back, and she could see him waving, all the way up there. “Good-bye!” called Rarity, back to him. “It was lovely meeting you! I hope we can do this again soon, sometime!”
He laughed, and waved the whip, and for a moment, all was still. Rarity held her breath.
Good-bye!
She smiled, and ran up as Gertie stepped back into the world. “There you are, darling!”
Gertie trumpeted, swung her head down for a hug. Her scales were hard and very beautiful, and Rarity realised the great dinosaurus was crying, huge fat tears that ran down her cheeks and soaked the ground in puddles.
Rarity pulled back. “I'm not going to see you again, am I?”
Gertie's massive shoulders rose and fell, a shrug, in motion. No, thought Rarity, looking her over, perhaps not. No, maybe she wouldn't suit clothes, after all. Such dreams were better left to the animals that needed them: humans and ponies and griffons and yaks. I wonder what the weather's like there, this time of year? Cold, probably. She smiled, despite herself. Well. Perhaps she didn't need to give up on fashion entirely...
Music rose, and Gertie began to bob her head. Oh, all right. One last go.
And there the two of them danced, as the rhythm moved through the air and slowly all the lines began to come undone, rolling up like thread the mountains, the trees, the rocks, until there wasn't much left but she and Gertie, and then they began to unravel as well, leaving nothing but whiteness, a blank expanse of possibility. Everything froze.
And Rarity woke up.
Also LikedSimilarAuthor
- Botched Lobotomy · 1.2k words · 22 6 · 882 views
- JudgementalHat · 5.3k words · 26 0 · 431 views
- GaPJaxie · 14k words · 38 4 · 340 views
- 8_Bit · 29k words · 68 2 · 825 views
- Seer · 4.8k words · 70 3 · 945 views
- AugieDog · 5.2k words · 46 2 · 575 views
Stats
Page generated in 0.179 seconds
Total duration
922 users online
1,751,238 hits today, 2,139,894 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Lovely.
(The lack of an exclamation point is ONLY because a quiet mood suits this work.)
Meaningful to me at a personal level.
11199872
Aww, thanks! I’m so glad it reached you.
Wow, this is my favorite "Who Crossed Over" piece I've read so far!
First of all, well done capturing Rarity's voice - I heard her in my head the entire time I was reading
I watched the video in the description before I started and I'm really glad I did. You did a great job turning a short animation into something to be interacted with. I especially like the "slides" as a form of communication. I'm also happy to learn something new about the beginnings of animation that I did not know before - thank you for that!
And the story itself : I feel, Rarity, I feel
Reading as she talked of loving the dream but not so much the waking up part was so bittersweet.
Overall, awesome job!
Fascinating. I was wondering how you'd tie together the dreams and reality, and you did so marvelously. The dramatic irony is very strong with this one. After all, a century or so after Gertie, the art McCay invented, in all its subsequent mass production and commercialization and so forth, would yield Rarity. The dream shifts, but it never really goes away. One hopes it doesn't, anyway.
Wonderful meditation on changing eras, those who get left behind, and the question of just who's moving at the wrong pace. The open ending works very well. Rarity may have given the industry something to think about, or she may have sealed her fate as incurably behind the times. We won't know, and given the themes of the story, it's probably better that we don't. Still, she should probably send a letter to Luna to see what the heck just happened.
Thank you for this, and best of luck in the judging.
I appear to be the thumbs-up that took this out of the gray bar, and I'm proud of that. This is a work of art.
holy shit.
I don't really know what else to say, but please trust me when I say I loved this. It actually got me emotional! holy shit, holy shit, this was incredible.
You write Rarity so well. Your prose is fantastic. I'm legit in awe. I aspire to write a fic like this someday
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/Winsor_McCay_1922-03-19_Oblivion%27s_Cave.jpg/1920px-Winsor_McCay_1922-03-19_Oblivion%27s_Cave.jpg
Captioned: Oblivion's Cave--Step Right In. Winsor McCay (1922).
The sad thing about dinosauruses, of course, is that eventually, there just weren't any more of them. Birds may live on in their own kind of majesty (and it is magical!), elephants may recreate some distant memory of the sound of thunder, but the great sauropods of old have never been replaced, and likely never will.
I'm glad Rarity was able to do something transformystic with the end of her career. The real Winsor enjoyed some new developments at the end of his. Reviving Little Nemo for a bit. Doing some sketches for a newspaper of a fresh crime scene. But he never drew cartoons like he did in his golden age. Some of the old wonders just pass us by, never to return.
11218330
Very much appreciated, I assure you!
11219938
Aww, thank you! I'm so glad it touched you!
11220203
Yes! There were so many other interesting things McCay did after leaving animation, and even more before then that I didn't have nearly the time to get into. And I think part of him not returning to it was choice -- not liking the way the industry was going, and all that. It's a romantic idea, but in cases like these I like to remember the words of the late great Sir Terry Pratchett: "A man is not dead while his name is still spoken." I somehow doubt he'd much appreciate being remembered in fanfic for a show that exemplified all the hypercapitalist nonsense he rejected in animation, but still. Like you say, sometimes the old wonders pass by -- the sauropods are gone -- but they still left a bloody big footprint, didn't they.
11222128
Regarding the passing of the dinosauruses: That's true, and a lovely way of looking at it. I'm a dinosaur scientist by trade, you see. It's what got me interested in your story. And while we may never seen a sauropod, for generations after they were gone, there have been creatures that have found their ancient footprints frozen in stone and wondered.
Regarding Winsor and Friendship Is Magic, I think he'd see it as an inevitability, really. It started as a woman's remembrance of her childhood. Rarity, Twilight, Pinkie and the gang are all Faust's imaginary friends, come to life for another generation to play with. I think he would like that. That a corporation then drove her away from her own creation by pumping it full of soulless merchandise grabs would not surprise him and likely sadden him. But, at the same time, she then made the characters for Them's Fightin' Herds, and seems to have made some peace in what happened between her and Hasbro in that. Maybe that's the lifecycle of all artists. I hear George Lucas is much happier with his new museums of film history that he's been building than he ever was running the Star Wars juggernaut. Who knows.
What a wonderful story.
I had never seen Gertie before, so thank you for that alone.
I'm trying my best but I don't have anything to say that the others haven't said already. Congratulations on your victory, it was well deserved. And bringing these great artistic minds together, across a century and different dimensions, was inspired.
An oddball ghost happened across your fic and read it. Have a review!
It took me a bit to read this, but once I realized that you were the same author as Paths Less Travelled I just HAD to dive in and I was thoroughly pleased to have read this. The parallels between Rarity's struggles and Winsor's own life and with such a poignant ending, another assured fave.
11369690
Hey, thanks so much! Happy to hear that one of my stories made enough of an impact on you to read another.
If something is keeping you back, if you find yourself not letting go just ~because~, it's time to reflect and see what else you can do
You can has review!
I hate it when I go to read a story and instead I accidentally read literature. I never understand literature.