Mutt and Jeff — 1908-08-26

Six panels follow lanky Mutt and his shorter companion Jeff through a New York street mishap. Mutt paints a building facade from a plank scaffold, enlisting Jeff to hold the rope; Jeff promptly lets go, sending Mutt crashing. On the ground, a stranger bets Mutt that a horse named Arondack can't lose — Mutt takes the wager, the horse bolts past in a blur labelled *ZING*, and a bystander deadpans that it must be one of the Wright Brothers. Fisher's ink line is confident and loose, the speech balloons tightly integrated into each panel. *Mutt and Jeff*, launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, was among the first strips built around a fixed cast of recurring characters — a structural invention that would shape every comic book that followed.