Jimmy! The Comic Art of James Swinnerton

The long and fruitful career of James Swinnerton is too vast to be contained in one volume. The cartoonist worked on so many projects, in different disciplines, that one overview can’t do more than hint at certain sides of his career. Swinnerton was one of newspaper comics’ pioneers; his work in comics stretches from the 1890s to the late 1950s. He also distinguished himself as a landscape artist of the American Southwest. His fascination with Native American culture gave his work a vivid window into a world he adopted and a way of life that agreed with him and nourished him.

The talented editorial group at Sunday Press have delivered a tantalizing, long-overdue look at the life and work of this unique American cartoonist. It’s not their fault that there isn’t enough space in this 160-page oversized volume to fit it all in. I hope this is the first of a series of books that explore the many avenues of Swinnerton’s creative efforts. Having this much newly restored to the public eye is a gift.

James Swinnerton was best-known for his long-running King Features Syndicate comic-strip Little Jimmy (1904-1958, with some off-and-on periods) and for the monthly Good Housekeeping color page Canyon Kiddies (1922-1944, again with some pauses in production). The latter had a one-shot animated adaptation by Chuck Jones as the 1940 Warner Brothers cartoon Mighty Hunters — for which Swinnerton painted the static backgrounds in oil colors, much to the consternation of the cameraman, who groused that the gummy paint stuck to the reverse of the animation cels.

Swinnerton rose to fame in an era when newspaper cartoonists were public celebrities — four-color rock-stars who wore flashy clothes and depicted the world around them with wit and satire. In his early years, Swinnerton created a bear cub mascot for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, which became an icon for the newspaper, and, for the New York Journal, a tiger mascot known as Mr. Jack. At this time, he lived the urban bon vivant lifestyle: work hard, play harder. He subsisted on little sleep, daily deadlines, black coffee and booze, and his health soon suffered from the fug and hustle of big-city life. By the 1900s, Swinnerton’s excesses threatened to kill him. The benevolent Hearst sent him to California for a rest cure. Swinnerton weaned himself off liquor and fell in love with the vivid, wide-open world of the Western desert. Its vibrant colors and endless deep spaces, full of a sense of the timeless and of the mysteries of life, became his home.

Themes of Southwestern life — and a caring inclusion of Native American ways — then entered his work. Full-page thematic covers for The San Francisco Call’s Sunday editions of the 1920s offer striking compositions and colors that foreshadow his fine-art landscapes. Little Jimmy, a variations-on-a-theme strip about a tot who causes chaos without intending to, relocated to Swinnerton’s new home. A charming 1913 page has Jimmy awed by the natural beauties of the Grand Canyon at a time when it took a rugged trip to earn a look at its glory.

The heart of this volume is a curated selection of Little Jimmy pages. Surrounding it are compelling examples of other Swinnerton comics. Michael Tisserand writes a thoughtful appreciation of the artist’s most controversial strip, Sam and His Laugh, which ran from 1905 to ’06; its character made occasional guest appearances in other artists’ strips, as cartoonists did at comics’ dawn. Sam is a Black man who applies for want-ad jobs in white households. He can’t help himself – the puffery and hypocrisy of his potential employers strikes him as ridiculous. He struggles not to laugh, but these bourgeois buffoons’ perseverance proves too much to handle. Sam erupts in a wealth of guffaws, and is escorted from the premises as his sides ache from righteous laughter.

As Tisserand notes, Sam belongs to the minstrel tradition of American humor, and as such must be approached with caution by 21st-century audiences. But he’s not a negative stereotype. There’s an air of Mark Twain about his personality. Sam’s lack of pretension — and his keen awareness of its place in the Caucasian world — make him a super-hero whose power is the ability to wither hubris at a glance. In the 1905 strip “The Whole Sam Family,” its title a take-off on a suggestive pop song of the day, a grouchy white pedestrian chances upon Sam’s large brood. They erupt in an orgy of mockery/merriment at this sour bystander. Sam is a delightful comic character who feels like a revolutionary in these newspaper pages from over a century ago.

We also see several examples of Swinnerton’s earlier cartooning — from editorial pieces to spot illustrations to Mr. Jack pages, the artist’s Mount Ararat tableaus of a colorful group of mischievous animals raising Cain, and one-shot strips that include brilliant formal play on comics’ vocabulary. A pair of 1900 strips reproduced on page 34 turn the speech balloon — then an innovation in comics — into a meta-comic strip container to marvelous effect. Another 1900 effort, “The Twentieth-Century Adventure,” achieves a proto-psychedelic effect in its wild astral imagery and color palette.

Swinnerton’s daily comic-strip work deserves a collection all its own. The examples shown include a 1933 Little Jimmy sequence that depicts Native American weather gods at work. These eight strips whet the reader’s appetite for more and suggest a deeper substance to the weekday editions than the knockabout comedy of its Sunday pages.

Swinnerton, like many pioneering cartoonists, drew in a way that belied his true artistic skill. I’ve always found Swinnerton’s newspaper cartooning a bit ungainly compared to the elegant color wash paintings of the Canyon Kiddies, or of his later landscapes, which show the artist’s obsession with capturing every contour and detail of its hypnotic colors and space. Most newspaper cartoonists drew for reproduction and knew the limitations of the printing press. Though they enjoyed an elbow room any modern comics-maker might envy, they realized that simple worked best with the high-speed production of the newspaper.
That said, there are many moments of elegance in Swinnerton’s work. He has a gift for imbuing a sense of wild motion to his figures. His understanding of body language is strong, and his animal characters share a delightful look and feel. His human beings mostly come off as drab — except for his children, who bound with a love of life and an embrace of their youth and freedom. It makes sense that Swinnerton stood with the pint-size world of Little Jimmy for most of his cartooning career.

A lesser-known strip — Swinnerton’s only serious adventure effort — Rocky Mason, Government Marshall, interrupted Little Jimmy’s Sunday run for four years during the second World War. "Fletcher Hanks!", I thought when I viewed the brief selection of these strips. The resemblance is striking. Mason is an odd but fascinating hybrid of comical and realistic styles, in the vein of Harold Gray and Bob Leffingwell’s long-running Little Joe (subject of another fine Sunday Press collection). As Peter Maresca notes of the strip, its Southwestern setting is stripped of the fantasy and whimsy seen in Little Jimmy. It may have been an impulse Swinnerton needed to explore, or a sabbatical from drawing little kids and animals. File under: Footnotes, Intriguing.

A brief survey of Swinnerton’s oil paintings — possibly his best-known work to the world at large — show the true love and appreciation of their creator’s eye, as he attempts to capture the casual elegance of nature. To view these paintings is to feel Swinnerton’s gratefulness for his surroundings and his conscious intent to honor them with his efforts.

Jimmy! makes a strong case for James Swinnerton as a Renaissance man of 20th-century comics. I hope we will see more of his work restored to print; this is a fine sampler of a long and productive creative career—and a man who had the good fortune of the public eye throughout his decades of work.

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