James Swinnerton created a variety of comic strips in the first half of the 20th century, with his longest-running strip following the adventures of a mischievous young boy named Jimmy. Remarkably, he also found later success in a second career as a painter of desert landscapes, inspired by his relocation to America’s Southwest desert. This exhaustively researched and curated collection of his career work covers everything from his early sports and editorial illustrations for Hearst newspapers through his multiple comic-strip creations and fine-arts work, presenting a comprehensive look at a pioneering artist.
Buy Jimmy! The Comic Art of James SwinnertonIn addition to his early California newspaper work illustrating news stories, he created anthropomorphized bears that were possibly the first daily comic-strip characters, although they were little more than border embellishment. The bears grew increasingly saucer-eyed and duck-billed, before eventually morphing into tigers to appeal to East Coast audiences. This led to a series of short-lived strips as he tried out ideas and moved on to others, including a look at the adventures of the animals on Noah’s ark and a dapper gentleman tiger named Mr. Jack. Eventually, he landed on the universal appeal of a flighty young boy named Jimmy who would typically be tasked with a fetch quest by his parents each week, only to get distracted along the way and get in trouble upon his eventual empty-handed return.
The book contains multiple in-depth essays about Swinnerton’s work by various writers, resulting in a bit of information overlap as the individual writers unknowingly tread similar ground by working in their separate bubbles. Overall though, the text is hugely beneficial to grasping an understanding of his background, inspirations, and personal struggles that inevitably influenced his work. The biggest influence was undoubtedly his move to the Southwest, shifting the makeup of Jimmy from vanilla suburbia to wide-open desert vistas, with Jimmy’s friend group also changing to Native Americans. No mention of the move is made in the strips included here, with Jimmy simply carrying on as always in his wildly new environment. The move also inspired Swinnerton’s second career as a painter, facilitating the creation of masterful art pieces bearing no resemblance to his newspaper cartoonist work.
As usual with Sunday Press releases, the dimensions of the new oversized collection are gigantic, giving readers the chance to experience the full-page Sunday strips at sizes approaching their original newspaper presentation. The book measures roughly 13” x 17”, with 160 pages of nicely weighted matte paper. The first half of the book covers the full spectrum of Swinnerton’s career, while the back half is wholly reserved for a curated collection of Jimmy’s Sunday strips. As an added bonus, a perforated sheet of four postcards from 1906 featuring various Swinnerton single-panel gags are tucked in the front of the book just waiting for stamps, a fun surprise as readers open the cover for the first time.
The strips are almost entirely in full color, and the colors are crisp and clear without appearing overly manipulated, retaining their original watercolor hues. Swinnerton wasn’t a fan of crosshatching or any other substantial shading in his inking, so his clean lines are still fully legible. On the down side, his tiny word balloons in early Jimmy strips make for a bit of a reading challenge, but as the years roll by the text size clearly increases, perhaps due to diminishing newspaper space at the time but now a boon to modern audiences.
While Swinnerton is now largely forgotten, the new book makes a strong case for his ongoing recognition. As an early architect of the comic-strip art form, he played a significant role in the development of sequential-art standards still followed today. This superb overview of his career paints the definitive picture of an overlooked founding father of comics.
