Mutt and Jeff — 1908-04-04

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* was among the first American newspaper strips to run daily with a continuous cast and sequential panel storytelling. This strip—headlined "Little Jeff Gets the Hook Again"—unfolds across eight panels: the lanky, fast-talking Mutt schemes with diminutive Jeff around a prizefighting angle involving Jeffries and 'Pickels,' trading insults and revenge plots while a Q&A column runs alongside. Fisher's draftsmanship is loose and kinetic; speech balloons carry the comedic weight entirely. Running in the *San Francisco Chronicle* from 1907, *Mutt and Jeff* pioneered the daily strip format—fixed characters, cliffhanger continuity, standardized panel grids—structural conventions that would directly shape the anthology comic books of the 1930s.