Mutt and Jeff

This strip follows the tall, hapless Mutt and his short companion Jeff through a running gag involving romance, impersonation, and a punch to the face — the classic machinery of early newspaper comedy. Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907 as a daily strip, making it among the first continuous narrative comic strips built around recurring characters. Fisher pioneered the horizontal panel sequence and the comedic beat that closes each strip with a reversal or pratfall. The speech balloons, sequential panels, and recurring cast that Fisher and his contemporaries refined in these newspaper pages became the direct structural blueprint for the comic book form that emerged in the 1930s.