Jim Mooney was born in New York City and raised in Los Angeles. Friends with pulp-fiction author Henry Kuttner and Californian science-fiction fans such as Forrest J. Ackerman, he drew the cover for the first issue of Imagination, an Ackerman fanzine that included Ray Bradbury\'s first published story, "Hollerbochen\'s Dilemma". Kuttner encouraged the teenaged Mooney to submit art to Farnsworth Wright, the editor of the pulp magazine for which Kuttner was writing, Weird Tales. Mooney\'s first professional sale was an illustration for one of Kuttner\'s stories in that magazine. During this period, Mooney also met future comic-book editors Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz, who had come to the area to meet Kuttner.\n', '

After attending art school and working as a parking valet and other odd jobs for nightclubs, Mooney went to New York City in 1940 to enter the fledgling comic-book field. Following his first assignment, the new feature "The Moth" in Fox Publications\' Mystery Men Comics #9-12 (April–July 1940), Mooney worked for the comic-book packager Eisner & Iger, one of the studios that would supply outsourced comics to publishers testing the waters of the new medium. He left voluntarily after two weeks: "I was just absolutely crestfallen when I looked at some of the guys’ work. Lou Fine was working there, Nick Cardy ... and Eisner himself. I was beginning to feel that I was way, way in beyond my depth...." \n', '

Mooney went on staff at Fiction House for approximately nine months, working on features including "Camilla" and "Suicide Smith" and becoming friends with colleagues George Tuska, Ruben Moreira, and Cardy. He began freelancing for Timely Comics, the 1940s predecessor of Marvel, working on that company\'s "animation" line of funny animal and movie-cartoon tie-in comics.\n', '

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