Mutt and Jeff — 1908-08-23

Six panels follow the lanky Mutt visiting the diminutive Jeff in hospital, flowers in hand, only to confess he missed coming to Jeff's aid because a hot tip on racehorse Alfred Noble pulled him to the track. Jeff, bandaged in bed, absorbs the betrayal with deadpan resignation; Mutt, unrepentant, is already pitching a new bet on 'Ocean Bound' as the strip ends. Bud Fisher launched *A. Mutt* in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907—among the first strips built around a single recurring cast in daily installments. That continuity, paired with Fisher's clean ink line and naturalistic speech balloons, helped establish the vocabulary every subsequent cartoonist inherited: the recurring character, the running joke, the cliffhanger close.