Mutt and Jeff — 1908-04-03

This daily strip by Bud Fisher follows the tall, gullible Mutt and his pint-sized partner Jeff through a running gag built around war-game role-play: Mutt casts Jeff as a hapless general, schemes unravel panel by panel, and Jeff ends up the fall guy for a stranger's amusement — and a tidy 77,000-dollar payout neither will keep. Fisher's horizontal panel sequence, economical ink line, and speech balloons carrying distinct character voices were already codified grammar here, a full two decades before the first comic *book* reprinted such strips between covers. Launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, *Mutt and Jeff* was among the first strips with a single recurring cast to run daily, directly establishing the template every subsequent comic page — and eventually every comic book — would inherit.