Tracks of My Tiers: A Jimmy Swinnerton 1909 Video and Runaway Pie Wagon Comix

READING THE FUNNIES with Paul C. Tumey

Here's a little video I made from a scan of a great James ("Jimmy") Swinnerton half page Sunday comic, originally published May 19, 1909.

I made this video using PowerPoint, which I do for a living. I was able to use the slide transitions in PowerPoint to emulate the experience of reading the strip's three tiers, left to right. As an experiment, I chose a Dock Boggs song for musical accompaniment. Since the characters in this strip engorge themselves on pilfered sweets, the obvious choice was the Boggs tune, "Sugar Baby" (although the true subject of that song has little to do with the innocent fun in Swinnerton's world). I thought the rural quality of the music might fit with the country scene in the strip.

I am excited to discover how well the structure of the song fits with the strip's architecture. It's as if there was some sort of invisible relationship between songs and half-page to page-long comic strips as they were shaped in the first half of the twentieth century.

And, here's the strip:

Little Jimmy by James Swinnerton - May 19, 1909
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

The runaway pie wagon was an idea Swinnerton returned to, at least once (probably more) a couple of years later:

"I Seen Yo' Ad In Dep Paper" - SAM and His Laugh (1905-06): Joyously Subversive

One of my favorite screwball artists is James "Jimmy" Swinnerton (1875-1974). 

Born in Eureka, California. In 1892, Swinnerton began his career as a staff cartoonist for Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, where he produced a popular weekly cartoon, The Little Bears (1893-1897). He moved to New York in 1896 to work for Hearst’s Journal-American, where he created Mount Ararat (1901-1904), Mister Jack (1903-1906), and his longest-running strip, Little Jimmy (1904-1958). In 1906,

James Swinnerton contemplates
his self-portrait in 1930

Swinnerton was diagnosed with a fatal case of tuberculosis. His friend and publisher, William Randolph Hearst, sent him to Colton, California, where he recovered and fell in love with the American desert. He became a noted landscape painter and died in Palm Springs, at the age of 98.

The nuttiest of Swinnerton’s early comics is Sam and His Laugh (1905-1906) an infectious series featuring a job-seeking black man who gleefully laughs at the hypocrisy and pomp of society.  While Sam is drawn in the typical black man stereotype common in early 20^th century pop culture, it’s clear that Swinnerton sides with him as an instinctive hero of disruption who tears down the walls of social order with a bellylaugh – exactly what humor comics are all about.  

What follows are a few examples of this remarkable strip which art spiegelman has observed works like a laughing record-- 78s  popular in the early 20th century that contained nothing but the sound of someone laughing. It was impossible not to listen to these records without succumbing to laughter. Similarly, it is well nigh impossible to read Swinnerton's SAM comics without smiling.

In this strip, Sam starts out with his customary statement: "I seen yo' ad in dep paper." He finds much joy and amusement in the unintentional truism embedded in a stuffy church hymn.

SAM by Jimmy Swinnerton - 1905
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

Sam tries his hand as a waiter. Maybe if he was in a diner, he could keep a straight face, but the pretension of the fancy French menu does him in...

The above comic came from the one and only book collection of Sam strips, a hardcover, 48-page color book published in 1906 by the Hearst outfit (one of several collections they published of their popular comics):

Here is the waiter SAM strip from above, as it was published in the newspaper on March 12, 1905:

Sam  by James Swinnerton - March 12, 1905

In this next strip, Sam loses it over a mis-matched couple's adoration, overheard on a subway train. The man in this strip looks a lot like a Milt Gross character:

SAM by Swinnerton - May 21, 1905

In another train strip, Swinnerton pulls out all the stops and shows us Sam's wife and children -- all of whom share his keen sense of absurdity:

SAM by Swinnerton - November 19, 1905
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

Though forgotten today, Sam was popular in his time. He gloriously adorned the cover of a 1905 sheet music folio:

You can listen to a 1905 recording of this remarkable song, "There's A Dark man Coming With A Bundle" here:



I'll leave you with one last SAM, which features a portrait of Swinnerton's colleague, cartoonist Rudolph Dirks, who created the hit comic "The Katzenjammer Kids." Note in the last panel that Dirks signed the strip with Swinnerton -- indicating this strip was a "jam."

I am pleased to note that the astounding new book, Society Is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip 1895-1915 includes a SAM strip (the very first one!), as well as several other incredible color comics pages by Swinnerton (including more jam pages!). These are all printed in their HUGE original size. You can learn more about this book, which includes over 150 stunning comics, great essays (I wrote one), and lots more here.

Wow!,
Paul Tumey

Pigging Out on Jimmy Swinnerton - A Rare 1912 Color Sunday

James Swinnerton had a remarkable appeal in his  screwball drawings of dogs and children. Here's a very rare color Sunday page from 1912 that features plenty of hilarious kids and pigs, plus a great bulldog. Robert Beerbohm has published several letters from old-time cartoonist Ernie McGee, who points out in one letter that the dogs in a comic authored by another cartoonist (I think it was Dirks) were drawn by Swinnerton. McGee said that no one could render a funnier bulldog, and Swinnerton was occasionally asked to "guest-star" in a fellow cartoonist's strip by drawing in some of his bulldogs.

This scan is from my own paper collection. The comic itself is extremely fragile and fell apart as I scanned it. I'm happy to be able to preserve these treasures. Hopefully more folks will come to appreciate the greatness of Jimmy Swinnerton and the works of his fellow screwball masters shared on this blog!

Little Jimmy by James Swinnerton August 18, 1912
(from the collection of Paul C. Tumey)

Even though it's not named as such, this page is part of Swinnerton's long-running Little Jimmy series, sometimes spelled as Little Jimmie. Jimmy's often tasked by his father with minding the baby, or going on an urgent errand. Jimmy is easily, always, and inevitably side-tracked, and the result is often comic chaos.

The scene in panel 8, where the father sees what he thinks is his baby playing with the piggies is screwballism par excellence. This sort of set-up is exactly what Milt Gross would recreate about 25 years later. In Gross' case, the father's panic would be hugely exaggerated, with hair standing on end, hat flying into the stratosphere, and the entire body stiff as a board in shock and three feet off the ground. With Swinnerton, even though the comic exaggeration is several notches below what we tend to expect in screwball comics, the basic framework for this exaggerated humor is solidly present.

Swinnerton's story is fascinating. He started out as one of the very first newspaper cartoonists in New York, working for William Hearst, also a close friend. Swinnerton was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1906, and Hearst -- in great concern -- paid for his relocation to the arid desert out west. What a journey and a huge cultural shift that was for "Little Jimmy!" Swinnerton learned to love the west and spent weeks hiking and sleeping under the stars. he kept drawing his cartoons and would wait for trains to pass by when we came upon a track. He'd hand his cartoons to the train conductor, who would get them back to Hearst in New York. The very cartoon we share today may have undergone just such a cross-country journey.

Swinnerton's cure worked, and he lived until 1974. He shared his love of the desert, luring many fellow New York cartoonists to the ancient canyonlands. Swinnerton was the guy who introduced George Herriman to the desert and, as such, is probably responsible for the magical landscapes of Krazy Kat. 

Swinnerton started out as a charming cartoonist who could spin out screwball and slapstick with layers of disarming cuteness. After a while, his work became more spiritual and lyrical, and he integrated the desert and American southwest into his cartoons. He was highly sympathetic to the various American Indian cultures he experienced first-hand. Here's some breathtaking Little Jimmie dailies from 1933, in which Jimmy and his kid and animal friends have somehow migrated to the southwest:

Click here to hear a great rare 1963 audio interview with Swinnerton about his life and career.

Just wait till we get home,

Screwball Paul