Mutt and Jeff — "Lost Goats That I Have Met"

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* strip here runs as a single horizontal tier — the format that made newspaper comics a mass-circulation phenomenon. Five panels introduce a parade of named goats (Pickles, Beany, J. Tired Feeling, A. Mutt's Goat) alongside caricatured portraits, each captioned in dense newspaper text below the drawings. The gag turns on A. Mutt's chronic bad luck at the racing season: his goat is stolen, and the thief is still at large. Fisher's loose ink line, inset portrait medallions, and text-heavy caption blocks typify the transitional strip — part prose column, part sequential art. Fisher launched *Mutt and Jeff* in 1907 as the first successful daily comic strip, running six days a week, pioneering the recurring-character serial that would directly seed the comic book format.