Mutt and Jeff

Bud Fisher launched *Mutt and Jeff* in the San Francisco *Chronicle* in 1907—the first successful daily comic strip built around a single recurring cast, making it a direct ancestor of the modern comic book. This strip follows the lanky, top-hatted Mutt as he encounters a weeping girl whose brother stole her dollar; he asks her to holler for help, she does, and the resulting "OW-OO!" launches him over a fence. Fisher's six-panel horizontal layout, crisp ink line, and punchy speech balloons show the visual grammar already fully formed: sequence, timing, and physical comedy driven by panel-to-panel cause and effect. The strip ran syndicated until 1983, spanning 76 years of continuous publication.