Mutt and Jeff — 1908-09-08

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* is among the first daily comic strips to feature a single recurring cast across continuous storylines. This Sunday page follows the lanky, scheming Mutt as he hustles his way through New York: broke on a park bench, he takes two dollars to wheel a supposed invalid — who turns out to be the very large William Howard Taft — then loses the fee betting on a barber-shop sweepstakes, ending in a painful bicycle collision. Fisher's confident brushwork, expressive silhouettes, and economical speech balloons demonstrate the visual grammar newspaper strips were then codifying. Launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, *Mutt and Jeff* ran for decades and its collected reprints helped define what a comic book could be.