Mutt and Jeff — 1908-09-17

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* strip — here showing the lanky, hapless Mutt trying his hand at professional baseball in New York — is among the earliest true daily comic strips, running in the *San Francisco Chronicle* from 1907. Fisher pioneered the recurring cast of characters across consecutive daily installments, a structural invention that distinguished the strip from one-off panel cartoons. In this sequence, Mutt fumbles a fielding play to rowdy crowd applause, rendered in Fisher's loose, energetic ink line. The final panel references a news item about Dr. Cook, blending sports, celebrity news, and comedy in a single strip — exactly the hybrid form that would eventually migrate from broadsheet pages into the first collected comic books of the 1930s.