Mutt and Jeff

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* — here a six-panel daily strip — follows the lanky, scheming Mutt and his short, round companion Jeff through a restaurant escapade in New York. Mutt wins money, promises Jeff and his date a grand dinner, orders lavishly from a waiter, then vanishes to the restroom while the bill arrives; a policeman hauls the pair away as Jeff protests to the judge. Fisher's ink-line work is loose and kinetic, with expressive caricature faces, phonetically rendered dialect in speech balloons, and a clean left-to-right gag progression that still reads instantly. Launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, *Mutt and Jeff* was among the first strips to feature recurring characters in a continuous serialized narrative, establishing the daily comic strip as a commercial and artistic institution that directly prefigured the comic book format.