Mutt and Jeff

Six irregularly sized panels follow Augustus Mutt and his small companion Jeff through a courtroom farce: Mutt objects to a judge's conduct, a bull's-head crest appears mid-strip as visual joke, and the final panels crowd the frame with speech-balloon testimony and silver-stocking commentary. Bud Fisher launched *Mutt and Jeff* in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907—the first daily comic strip built around a single recurring cast, running six days a week. Fisher's strip proved that serialized characters could sell papers daily, not just Sundays, directly shaping the anthology reprint pamphlets of the 1930s that became comic books. The cramped, gag-dense balloon work here is early American strip draftsmanship at its most industrious.