Mutt and Jeff — "With Mutt in New York"

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* ran as a daily strip from 1907, making it among the first American comics built around a fixed cast and continuous storyline rather than single-panel gags. Here, the lanky schemer Mutt spots a U.S. Army recruitment notice and enlists — not from patriotism but to escape city life. The joke pivots on the men debating a bet, then bolting from the rifle range entirely. Fisher's strip established daily newspaper comics as a storytelling form: recurring characters with consistent personalities, sequential panels driving a punchline, and speech balloons carrying distinct voices. That grammar — invented on newsprint — became the structural foundation every comic book would inherit.