Mutt and Jeff — 1908-04-02

This daily strip by Bud Fisher—one of the first successful newspaper comics to run six days a week under consistent recurring characters—follows the lanky schemer Mutt and his pint-sized partner Jeff through a boxing-promotion hustle. Across roughly eight narrow panels, Mutt tries to arrange a fight between Jeff and heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries, navigating a manager, a promoter, and mounting expenses, while Jeff insists he must fight at once. A side column parodies a reader advice section. Fisher's strip, launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, pioneered the horizontal daily-strip format, stable character designs, and integrated speech balloons that editors, syndicates, and eventually comic-book anthologists would standardize as the foundational grammar of American sequential art.