Mutt and Jeff — 1908-08-19

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907 as a daily strip—one of the first comic strips designed specifically for the daily newspaper format rather than the Sunday page. This strip follows the lanky, scheming Mutt as he recruits acquaintances one by one into a horse-racing tip, each panel advancing the chain through telephone calls and street encounters until a bookie takes the bet. Fisher's panel-to-panel continuity, speech balloons carrying distinct voices, and a recurring cast gave readers a reason to return daily—habits that would define the comic book decades later. The strip's sequential joke structure and consistent character design were genuinely new formal contributions to visual narrative.