Jimmy Swinnerton's Little Bears 0

[Yellow Kid]

 It is generally accepted that Swinnerton's Little Bears, which started in the San Francisco Examiner in 1893, was the first comic strip with continuing characters.  It started as a small black and white strip and eventually grew into a large color comic.  Here is a picture of the  cartoon in its earliest days, examples of which are quite rare.

[50YrsCollctngCmcs]

Jimmy Swinnerton comes up quite a bit in the Herriman biography, KRAZY. I hadn't heard of him much before that. Shortly after reading the biography I was on a tour of the Hearst Castle in San Simeon and the tour guide mentioned him in a list of the popular cartoonists that worked for Hearst. I found this amusing as I figured no one had any idea what she was talking about so I mentioned I had just read about him. This took her aback as she clearly had no idea who he was other than a name on a -script! Too funny!