Mutt and Jeff

This strip follows the legal misadventures of A. Mutt and his associate 'Atty. Beany,' rendered in a six-panel horizontal layout typical of early newspaper dailies. The headline — 'Mutt May Become Associate Counsel' — frames a courtroom-satire gag in which the lanky, top-hatted Mutt maneuvers to join his son's defense team. Bud Fisher's strip, launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, was among the first true daily continuity comics, establishing the recurring-character model that would define the form. Its speech balloons, consistent cast, and strip-format panel flow directly prefigured the comic book page. Fisher's work sits at the precise origin point where newspaper funnies invented the visual vocabulary — sequential panels, dialogue integrated into image — that comic books would industrialize three decades later.