Mutt and Jeff — c. 1908

Eight panels follow the hapless Mutt, who bets seven dollars at the races and wins fifty cents, then apparently leaps from a building in despair—only to land in the hospital alongside another unlucky soul. A doctor and policeman sort out the bodies while a sidebar column, *Ladies Corner by Hortense Debris*, runs deadpan advice on a poetry-quoting policeman suitor. Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907 as a daily strip—among the first comic strips built around a single recurring cast. Its horizontal panel sequence, integrated speech balloons, and slapstick continuity directly shaped the conventions that would define the comic book form when syndicates began reprinting newspaper pages as bound pamphlets two decades later.