Mutt and Jeff — 1909-10-19

Seven panels follow Mutt through a New York barbershop, slumped in the chair while the garrulous barber chatters about Judge Gaynor, Ty Cobb, and a horse named Bonnie Relso. Each conversational gambit earns the same deadpan retort — "I don't care!" — until the barber mentions a betting tip, whereupon Mutt bolts upright. Fisher's loose ink line and stovepipe-hatted protagonist were already fixtures of American dailies; *Mutt and Jeff*, launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, is among the first strips built on a consistent cast and continuous narrative across daily installments. That structural logic — recurring characters, sequential panels, speech balloons carrying the whole comedy — fed directly into the anthology comic books of the 1930s, making Fisher's pages foundational documents in the medium's evolution.