James retailer Swinnerton Canyon Kiddies Scrapbook from Good Housekeeping 1933-1940

James Swinnerton created a series of cartoons for Good Housekeeping called Canyon Kiddies and they were collected from 1933 to 1940 for for this scrapbook. The scrapbook was rescued from a hoarder tag sale we conducted and saved from the dumpster!

The Canyon Kiddies scrapbook includes 62 pages of comics taken from Good Housekeeping. The pages are 9" by 12", and the scrapbook has faux leather and cork covers and construction paper pages. It is bound by a tied string.

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.

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 retailer 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.