Jimmy Swinnerton
| Jimmy Swinnerton | |
|---|---|
sketch by Maynard Dixon, 1922
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| Born | November 13, 1875 |
| Died | September 8, 1974 (aged 98) Palm Springs, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Area(s) | Cartoonist and oil paintings |
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Notable works
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The Little Bears, Mr. Jack, Little Jimmy |
| Spouse(s) | Gretchen Swinnerton |
James Guilford Swinnerton (November 13, 1875 – September 8, 1974) was an American cartoonist and a landscape painter of the Southwest deserts. He was known as Jimmy to some and Swinny to others. He signed some of his early cartoons Swin, and on one ephemeral comic strip he used Guilford as his signature. Experimenting with narrative continuity, he played a key role in the development of the comic strip at the end of the 19th century.
Jimmy Swinnerton's birthplace is a matter of dispute, with one gallery-owner giving Eureka, California, and another writing,
Swinnerton has been reputed over the years to have been born [in California] in either San Francisco, , San Jose or Eureka. Because no certificate exists to provide documentation, the true location of his arrival in this world is not known. His biographer, Harold Davidson, states that “presumptive evidence” points to Eureka. His listed date of birth November 13, 1875 was, according to Swinnerton himself, without dispute.
The son of Judge J. W. Swinnerton, Jimmy was 14 when he entered the San Francisco School of Design, where the painter Emil Carlsen was one of his instructors. He was still a teenager when he became a staff cartoonist for Hearst's San Francisco Examiner in 1892. One of his first assignments was to produce for the children's section of the newspaper a weekly cartoon, successively titled California Bears, The Little Bears and Little Bears and Tykes. Some comic art historians have called the Little Bears the first comic strip, preceding The Yellow Kid by three years. This assertion is debatable, depending on the definition of comic strip, but Swinnerton was certainly drawing multi-panel stories with speech balloons by 1900.
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