Mutt and Jeff — 1909-10-04

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* is among the earliest true daily comic strips, launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907 and soon syndicated nationally. This strip follows the lanky, hapless Mutt taking a messenger job in New York: he grabs a posting off a wall, receives a $500 vase and a telegram marked rush, then consults the tiny Jeff on which to deliver first. Jeff reads the note — instructing the recipient to hock his flat and bribe a police chief — and Mutt promptly smashes the vase. Fisher's clean ink line, naturalistic cityscapes, and fluid panel-to-panel continuity helped codify the sequential grammar that newspaper strips handed directly to the first comic books three decades later.