Little Sammy Sneeze

Little Sammy Sneeze
Sammy disrupts the work of a clockmaker in the Little Sammy Sneeze episode for September 18, 1904
Author(s)	Winsor McCay
Launch date	July 24, 1904
End date	December 9, 1906
Publisher(s)	New York Herald

Little Sammy Sneeze was a comic strip by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. In each episode the titular Sammy sneezed himself into an awkward or disastrous predicament. The strip ran from July 24, 1904, until December 9, 1906, in the New York Herald, where McCay was on the staff. It was McCay's first successful comic strip; he followed it with Dream of the Rarebit Fiend later in 1904, and his best-known strip Little Nemo in Slumberland in 1905.

In contrast to the imaginative layouts of Little Nemo, Sammy Sneeze was confined to a rigid grid and followed a strict formula: Sammy's sneeze would build frame by frame, contorting the protagonist's face until it erupted in the second-to-last panel. In the closing panel he suffered the consequences—often a kick in the rear. McCay targeted middle-class pretensions such as consumerism and squeamishness over bodily functions, while reaffirming the social order by ensuring that Sammy received punishment.

McCay's artwork was finely detailed and highly accurate in its persistent repetition. He delved into modernist experimentation, shattering fourth walls and even the strip's panel borders. The panel-by-panel buildup displayed McCay's concern with depicting motion, a concern that was to culminate in his pioneering animated films of the 1910s, such as Gertie the Dinosaur (1914).

The strip follows a simple concept: in each weekly instalment, Sammy sneezes with such power that it wreaked havoc with his surroundings. His sneeze builds until its release with the onomatopoeia "Chow!" in the second-to-last panel. In the last panel he suffers the consequences—being driven away by one of his victims, or often receiving a kick in the rear.

September 11, 1904

April 30, 1905

Winsor McCay worked in dime museums in Cincinnati from 1891, where he drew posters and advertisements. His ability to draw quickly with great accuracy drew crowds when he painted advertisements in public. He began working as a newspaper cartoonist full-time in 1898, and also freelanced for humor magazines. McCay moved to New York City in 1903 to work for the New York Herald, leaving behind his first comic strip, A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle. From January 1904 he created a number of other short-lived strips, before finding popular success with Sammy Sneeze that July.