Mutt and Jeff — 1908-08-28

Six panels follow the lanky, hat-wearing Mutt into a New York billiard hall, where a disputed pool shot escalates from table-side argument to a full brawl, ending with a battered figure in a doctor's office and Mutt placing a side-bet on the outcome. Bud Fisher's linework is loose and kinetic — exaggerated postures, crowded speech balloons, and punchy pacing carry the joke entirely through sequential images. Launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, *Mutt and Jeff* was among the first newspaper strips to use a fixed cast in continuous daily installments, establishing the template — recurring characters, strip format, panel-to-panel causality — that American comic books would inherit wholesale two decades later.