Mutt and Jeff — 1908-08-11

Six horizontal panels follow the lanky, top-hatted Mutt and his short companion Jeff through a running argument about a lost ten dollars. Mutt lectures Jeff to stop mentioning the money; Jeff, goaded, keeps raising it; Mutt threatens him with a brick; the strip ends with a neighbor's aside that Mutt, already stung on a horse race, still has $97 in the bank. Bud Fisher's daily strip—launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907—was among the first comic strips built around fixed, recurring characters with continuous storylines. Its horizontal panel sequence, integrated speech balloons, and consistent personality-driven humor directly established conventions that newspaper syndicates would industrialize, and that comic-book anthologists would reprint and bind, making strips like this one the literal raw material of the comic book form.