Mutt and Jeff — 1909-10-06

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* — first published in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907 — was among the earliest daily newspaper comic strips built around a fixed cast of recurring characters. This strip follows Mutt, broke and scheming, who spots a sleeping veteran outside a doorway and attempts to hustle medals off him for gambling money. The gag unfolds across eight horizontal panels in Fisher's loose, energetic pen line: slanted brick walls, expressive posture, and speech balloons carrying the entire comic load. Fisher helped establish the daily strip as a narrative unit — same characters, same voice, new situation — a structural convention that would directly shape the anthology comic books of the 1930s, which were essentially reprinted newspaper strips bound between covers.