Mutt and Jeff

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* — originally launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907 as a horse-racing strip — became the first American daily comic strip with a consistent cast, running six days a week and anchoring the strip's claim as a direct ancestor of the comic book format. This Sunday-style page shows the tall, credulous Mutt and his small companion Jeff navigating a topical gag built around the competing claims to having reached the North Pole — a genuine 1908–09 public mania involving Frederick Cook and Robert Peary. Fisher works across wide horizontal panels with caption-block dialogue beneath caricatured figures, a transitional layout between prose-heavy Victorian comics and the speech-balloon grammar that would soon dominate. The strip ran syndicated for decades, proving that recurring characters could sustain a mass audience indefinitely.