Mutt and Jeff — 1908-08-14

Six panels follow the lanky, obsessive horse-racing gambler Mutt as he ignores domestic life—his wife's dinner call, a baby choking on dynamite, the house catching fire—to study the racing form and handicap the fifth race. Each crisis escalates while Mutt barely looks up from his paper; the strip ends with him still placing bets. Fisher's clean ink line, rectangular panels of consistent width, and speech balloons anchored to specific speakers are already fully realized tools. Launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, *Mutt and Jeff* was among the first strips to run daily with a continuous recurring cast—a structural invention that made the comic strip a narrative medium and laid direct groundwork for the comic book format that followed three decades later.