Mutt and Jeff — 1908-09-15

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* is among the first true daily comic strips — running six days a week in the *San Francisco Chronicle* from 1907 — and this strip shows the mismatched pair recruited for a South Pole expedition. Tall, scheming Mutt and tiny Jeff appear in a sequence of ruled panels moving left to right: a pitch in street clothes, outfitting in furs, a shipboard phonograph scene, and a slapstick sprint across ice with a sign reading '8¼ miles to Brooklyn Bridge.' Fisher's confident brushwork, consistent recurring characters, and interlocking speech balloons helped codify the visual grammar that Sunday pages and dailies handed directly to the comic book form two decades later.