Winsor McCay seems to have been dead sure that most men were incurable louts, driven only by base instincts and animal pleasures. I guess that's why he was able to create such amazing editorial cartoons for Arthur Brisbane's preachy editorials -- he really bought into Brisbane's high-handed sermonizing.
While McCay was producing beautiful flights of fancy on Sundays, some of his weekday offerings were much more down to earth. And when McCay portrayed reality, among his favorite targets were men, generally of a certain age and social status, behaving like utter cads. A Perfect Gentleman is a model example of these strips, wherein hubby behaves like a bounder and a heel to everyone. Everyone, that is, except any pulchritudinous female who crosses his radar, at which point he turns into, yes, you guessed it, A Perfect Gentleman.
A Perfect Gentleman ran in amongst McCay's other weekday strip titles from November 25 to December 12 1912 in Hearst's New York American.
You gotta love how realistically he drew that woman's long hair in the first panel.
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