From the exhibition
Little Jimmy
· February 24, 1923

In this daily strip, Jimmy schemes to donate a tooth to a dentist for cash, then reassures his friend that extracting it will be easy. The plan backfires spectacularly when Jimmy encounters the actual procedure, leading to panicked regret and maternal consolation. Swinnerton's *Little Jimmy* exemplified the newspaper comic strip's golden age: recurring child characters, sequential panel progression with dialogue balloons, and physical comedy resolved across multiple frames. The strip ran for decades and helped establish visual conventions—panel borders, speech placement, expressive cartooning—that became foundational to the emerging medium of comic books.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain