Mutt and Jeff — 1909-10-17

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* — launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907 — was among the first daily comic strips to use a fixed cast of recurring characters in continuous narrative. This Sunday page follows the towering, hapless Mutt and his tiny companion Jeff through eight panels: Jeff's lady love has dropped him, Mutt takes the blame, and the strip resolves in a diner where Jeff, reading her letter, flings himself into a bowl of tripe. Fisher's brisk diagonal staging, confident pen line, and speech balloons carrying overlapping dialogue show the visual grammar of the form fully formed. Strips like this, syndicated nationally and later collected, directly seeded the comic book format of the 1930s.