A crowded multiverse teeming with critters, chaos, contraptions and calamities – the many creations of a fine artist, magazine & book illustrator, cartoonist and painter whose work spanned nearly seven decades. Cady specialized in constructing vivid, imaginative realms, over-populated with animals, people, and anthropomorphic bugs. This landmark monograph – the first-ever art book devoted to the work of this master – includes a career-spanning biography with over four hundred images. Step inside this bustling world and you’ll find beetle ballerinas and fiddle-playing spiders, small towns alive with community and music, heartbreaking depictions of the devastations wrought by the Great War, and so much more. With a special focus on the abundant, hyperdetailed, microcosmic megalopoli which characterized Cady’s early work, this overflowing tome lays out an astonishing visual feast, and tells the unforgettable story of one of the mad geniuses of American art.

The alluring entrance to Hell begins, counter-intuitively, high in the clouds.

Acrid and sulfuric fumes waft from far below, but no one is deterred by the warning scents. Men and women push and shove their way through the portal, ravenously descending along a deep zigzagging stairway. At every step sideshows offer enticing temptation. The entrants throw themselves willingly into such noxious sins as flirting, smoking, cussing, dancing, watching prizefights, and betting on horses. Some dare to deal cards, attend theater performances, or play sports on the Sabbath. Those impatient to reach Hades are encouraged to cheat on their spouses via a fast elevator heading south. After indulging in lives of godless pleasures the debauched and dissolute are eventually welcomed by a committee of grotesque demons.

“The Road to Hell” was the creation of a particularly imaginative and memorable artist named Walter Harrison Cady. It appeared as a vertical centerfold in the November 17, 1910 issue of the original Life, a satirical humor magazine. Drawn less than a decade removed from the Victorian era's emphasis on religious faith, strict societal codes, and moral behavior, the cartoon spoofed the notion that social sins were deadly ones – as well as the idea that, for non-believers like Cady, the concept of Hell should be taken seriously at all.

A surface skim of “The Road to Hell” provides perfectly adequate enjoyment, but for readers willing to make their own deep descent into this and much of Cady’s early work, there are rich additional layers in his remarkably dense and detailed art: look closer in this image (with a magnifying glass, if one is handy) for the ill-fated souls pushed prematurely over the edge by the mob rushing to the first entrance, or the shadows within the boulder guardrails that reveal increasingly sinister faces, some human, some bird-like, and some spouting tears. Pause at the intensity of the concentric detail in the cumulus clouds, the gleeful spouting of the cursers, and the cutaway view of Hell whose staff is comprised of grotesque demons, each uglier than the next, some naked and some wearing three-piece suits and top hats.

Sometimes Cady included the kind of easy-to-miss visual rewards that today we would call Easter eggs. For example, an entire section of roadway is dedicated to "Life's Improper Number", which refers to the magazine's February 24, 1910 edition, a long-anticipated "theme issue" that was devoted entirely to risqué humor. Meanwhile, note the tiny entries in the devil’s "Index of New Arrivals" containing the names of several fellow Life artists: Orson Lowell, Art Young, William H. Walker, Frederick T. Richards, C. J. Budd, Mark Fenderson, R. M. Crosby, Albert Blashfield, Otho Cushing, and the beginning of a tenth name (probably Henry Hutt). Young, a socialist cartoonist who frequently depicted his own scenes of Hell, is even mentioned twice; situated in the entryway to Hell, just above the welcome banner, is a framed picture of four devils signed with his name. The Index of New Arrivals also indicates that “special attention” be given to Life’s outspoken and controversial drama critic, James Metcalfe. The specific intent behind this jab is unfortunately lost to history.

This kind of visual maze, with frantically congested crowds, sub-sets of activity, and rabbit holes of infinite detail and distraction, is what first drew me to the work of Harrison Cady (1877-1970). His earliest two decades of work, from around the turn of the century into the 1920s, were already virtually forgotten in the popular American culture by the time I began my own career as a struggling underground cartoonist in the late 1960s. As an assiduous flea market and used bookstore hunter on a very limited budget, I would occasionally discover old magazines where Cady’s frenzied scenes and delightful bugs seemed to scurry right off the pages.

I began saving tearsheets of his magazine work, but had no reference point for him then. His familiarity to me and other younger readers at that time—and to decidedly smaller numbers now—was as the illustrator for prolific children’s book author and naturalist Thornton W. Burgess (1874-1965), and as the writer/artist for many years of the newspaper comic strip “Peter Rabbit.” But there was much more to Cady's professional life than his higher profile later years.