When Jim was first hired, he was a staff illustrator so he had to draw whatever was needed. One thing he did a lot in the early days was draw title illustrations for some sections of the newspaper. In this case, the Star Weekly was serializing the book “The Garden of Fate” by Roy Norton.
The Toronto Railway Company had a franchise to run Toronto streetcars from 1891 to 1921. However, there came to be problems with interpretation of the franchise terms, for the city. A series of annexations, especially in 1908–12, significantly extended the city limits. After many attempts to force the TRC to serve these areas, the city created its own street railway operation, the Toronto Civic Railways, to do so, and built several routes. This comic shows that you would have to pay another fare to use the other system. In 1921, with the end of the franchise, the city merged TRC and TCR into the Toronto Transportation Commission.
This is one the of earlier Jim comics from the Toronto Star Weekly. It accompanied a story by Byron H. Stauffer called “The Bet That Converted the Clergyman”. Rev. Stauffer seems to have been a clergyman himself who lived from 1870-1922.
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