Mutt and Jeff — 1909-10-18

This horizontal daily strip by Bud Fisher unfolds across roughly a dozen panels in his characteristic spare line work: tall, gangly Mutt and short, bowler-hatted Jeff trade rapid-fire dialogue with street characters debating who truly discovered the North Pole — a burning public controversy after Cook and Peary both filed rival claims in 1909. Speech balloons crowd the action; the gag escalates panel by panel until a physical punchline. Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff*, launched in 1907 as a racing-tip strip, was among the first comics built around a fixed cast of recurring characters appearing daily — a structural invention that turned newspaper strips from single-joke cartoons into something readers followed like serialized fiction, directly prefiguring the collected reprint pamphlets that became comic books.