Mutt and Jeff — 1909-10-13

Six panels track the runup to Mutt's wedding in New York: his tall, lanky frame paired against the diminutive Jeff as best man, a forgotten marriage license, a scramble for two dollars, and — while the bride waits at the church door — a last-panel glimpse of Jeff betting at a horse-racing board reading "Two on Ethereal to Win." Fisher's brushwork is loose and gestural, speech balloons integrated naturally into the action. Launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, *Mutt and Jeff* was the first successful daily comic strip with a recurring cast, running six days a week and proving that newspaper comics could sustain serialized narrative — a structural principle that would define the comic book form itself.