Mr. Jack

Mr. Jack was an American comic strip by Jimmy Swinnerton which ran in William Randolph Hearst newspapers from about 1903 until 1935. He may be the first developed "funny animal" character, a type that has since become a staple in the comics medium. The series may also be one of the earliest spin-offs of another comic strip. The character of Mr. Jack, a philandering playboy tiger, emerged around 1898 in Swinnerton's earlier Hearst feature, The Little Tigers, which started in 1896.

Jimmy Swinnerton began his career in 1892 as a young illustrator for the San Francisco Chronicle, one of William Randolph Hearst's newspapers. He began illustrating the weather section with a cute bear cub, which proved popular enough that Swinnerton's bears soon appeared throughout the paper. This feature, known as The Little Bears, is apparently the first American comic strip with recurring characters.

Swinnerton's talents drew attention in the Hearst chain, and in 1896 he was invited to draw cartoons for The New York Journal. Apparently at Hearst's request, he shifted his characters from bears to tigers, the emblem of Tammany Hall, creating The Little Tigers. At first fairly generic, over time individual characters began to emerge, the most popular being the womanizing playboy "Mr. Jack", who first appeared around 1898. Mr. Jack got his own Sunday strip starting on November 1, 1903. While previous animal characters in art and fiction were often given some human features, such as clothing and speech, Swinnerton went a step further with Mr. Jack by giving him an essentially human body below his tiger head, complete with hands rather than paws and an upright stance. As such, comics historian Don Markstein wrote that he was probably "the first fully-realized funny animal", a character type that would soon become very well established in comics and other media.

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