Mutt and Jeff — 1908-08-20

Six panels follow the lanky, top-hatted Mutt through a New York photography studio. He arrives eager to send portraits back to friends in Frisco, but the photographer's instructions — "foreshorten your beak as much as possible," "move your bean a trifle," "be sure to get that smile" — reduce him to contorted misery. A flash explosion sends him bolting when he mishears "Fighting Bob" as a racing tip, and he sprints off to place bets. Bud Fisher launched *Mutt and Jeff* in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in November 1907, making it the first successful daily newspaper comic strip with a recurring cast — establishing the horizontal multi-panel sequence, integrated speech balloons, and serialized character comedy that would directly seed the comic book format two decades later.