James Guilford Swinnerton (November 13, 1875 – September 5, 1974)[1][2] was an American cartoonist and a landscape painter of the Southwest deserts.

Experimenting with narrative continuity, he played a key role in developing the comic strip at the end of the 19th century.

"[3]The son of Judge J. W. Swinnerton, in his early teens Jimmy provided cartoon advertisements in the windows od local businesses.

This assertion is debatable, depending on the definition of comic strip, but Swinnerton was certainly drawing multi-panel stories with speech balloons by 1900.

[2] In 1940, he painted 50 backgrounds for Warner Bros. and Leon Schlesinger Productions for a Chuck Jones Merrie Melodies cartoon featuring the Canyon Kiddies, titled Mighty Hunters.

Art appraiser and curator Alissa J. Anderson described Swinnerton's work as a painter after he moved to the Southwest: During this time, he began to explore unfamiliar regions of deserts of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah.

His subjects often focused on the exotic contradictions of the desert, a place where the parched land coexisted with thriving beauty.

Often consisting of a single tree, or unadorned sand and brush, he captured the lonely, arid landscape in all its splendor.

In later years he had a studio in the Coachella Valley near Palm Springs, and the locally published Desert Magazine expanded his renown.