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James
Guilford "Jimmy" Swinnerton was born on November 13, 1875 in
Eureka, California. His father was a well-known Judge J.W. Swinnerton
, founder of the Humboldt Star.
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Swinnerton was
very young when he started his career at William Randolph Hearst's San
Francisco Examiner in 1892. He was hired to draw editorial cartoons,
sports cartoons and to illustrate the news. Soon, Hearst asked him to
draw a bear every day for the Examiner, celebrating the discovery, in
the forest of California, of a grizzli bear - a species thought to be
extinct. |
 Jimmy Swinnerton C. 1905 |
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By
the time the Midwinter exhibition opened in january 1894 (....), his baby
Monarch cub had become the great popular daily hit in San Francisco."
[From Bill Blackbeard, "The Art of Jimmy Swinnerton", NEMO N°22, oct 1986.] |
| Realising
the potential of his young star artist, Hearst asked him to move to New
York City, to work alongside George Herriman, Tad Dorgan, George McManus
etc. This was 1896, a year after Pulitzer's"The World" had introduced the Yellow Kid with phenomenal public success. |
 Little Tigers (c. 1905) |
In the following years, Swinnerton stood right beside Outcault and F.B. Opper in pionneering the stylistic, artistic et narrative possibilities of this new medium (the colored comic supplement). Apart from numerous one-shot pages, Swinnerton created a whole bunch of cute animals, The Little Tigers, which eventually coalesced into one character, the celebrated Mr Jack. He also drew a one panel series, Mt. Ararat, again showing his flair in drawing funny animals. |
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His most enduring success, however, was Little Jimmy, created in 1904
and which he drew for the next 54 years.
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Here's a short portrait of James Swinnerton (aged 30), written in 1905, shortly after the introduction of Little Jimmy : "James Swinnerton has done many good things; but his greatest hits have been his forgetful little boy, "Jimmie", who never gets what he is sent for; and his exasperating "Little Katy", who is always interrupting her kind uncle at inopportune times. Swinnerton gets "big pay", but his money comes easily and goes easily. |
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He
is "Bohemian" in his tastes, and much prefers the society of
pugilists to that of more conventional persons. His fad is sweaters and
he never wears the "boiled shirt" of civilization if he can
get on a sweater.
Of this article of apparel he has several hundred specimens, and most of them have added value in his eyes from the fact that they were worn and they were given to him by the doughty champions of the "squared circle". |
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He cares little for his fame or for the money that it has brought him. He was born with a facility for comic drawing, but spent his "teens" as a jockey, and his greatest pride to-day is to be taken for a pugilist. He has had set-tos
-purely scientific ones- with friends and even strangers; but he is
still in the "maiden class", not yet having won a battle." |
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But Swinnerton had another, more dangerous battle to fight. Around the same
period, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and given a few weeks to
live by his doctor. Swinnerton packed up his New York residence and
set up camp in the arid Southwest hoping to benefit from the dry climate
of Arizona. |
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However, the magnificence of the red rock canyons there engulfed Swinnerton, so much so that the atmospheric influence of the West would never extricate itself from his remaining life's work. Before long, Arizona themes began creeping into his work - not just in his comics but also in the paintings that formed an increasing part of his output. |
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Swinnerton
also created a series called Canyon Kiddies, about small Native
American children living in remote Arizona canyons, which Good Housekeeping
magazine (another Hearst publication) ran in color from 1922-41.
In Canyon Kiddies, the readers were introduced to the lush scenes Swinnerton had become so enamoured with. It is worth noting that the native Americans featured in the Canyon Kiddies cartoons were always depicted with great respect and sympathy. |
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Canyon
Kiddies was licensed for animated cartoons by Warner Bros. Swinnerton
himself drew no less than 50 background paintings for the film, producing
a stunning job. Only one Canyon Kiddies cartoon was made, Mighty Hunters,
directed by Chuck Jones, which came out in 1940.
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After 1958, Swinnerton
was unable to meet the demands of cartooning on a regular basis, and he
ended Little Jimmy.
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"Mr Jack" daily from 1919. > 
