Mutt and Jeff — 1908-08-12

Six panels follow the lanky, perpetually hapless Mutt through a domestic crisis in New York: after his horse is scratched at the races, he squares off against his wife wielding a rolling pin, pleads for one minute's mercy, and finally raids the sugar jar where she has hidden the bankroll — bolting in triumph while she rails behind him. Fisher's linework is loose and kinetic, speech balloons packed tight with vernacular argument. *Mutt and Jeff* launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907 as the first successful daily comic strip with a recurring cast, running six days a week and proving that serialized cartoon characters could anchor newspaper circulation — a commercial and formal discovery that made the eventual comic book anthology not just possible but inevitable.