Mutt and Jeff — 1908-09-29

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907 as the first successful daily comic strip built around a single recurring cast — a structural invention that made the modern comic book possible. This strip follows the lanky, perpetually broke Mutt sneaking into his landlady's apartment to raid the icebox, finding it empty, then hauling the box itself to a second-hand dealer. Six compact panels track the gag through pantomime and terse speech balloons, with Fisher's loose, energetic linework selling every pratfall. The visual grammar here — sequential panels of fixed size, character-driven cause-and-effect, punchy closing twist — became the template that King Features, Hearst, and Pulitzer would standardize, and that anthology reprint collections of such strips would eventually sell as "comic books."