Mutt and Jeff — 1909-10-21

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* — here titled "With Mutt in New York: More Charges Against Him" — runs six horizontal panels crowded with talky captions and hand-lettered speech. The gag: Mutt is accused of hiding golf balls in Judge Gander's whiskers; supporting characters (Herman Caddy, Deputy Sheriff Sherlock Schultz, a pompous judge) deliver mock-legal testimony in dense block text beneath each drawing. Fisher's loose ink line and caricatured faces — bulbous noses, outsized hats — typify the daily newspaper strip style he pioneered beginning in 1907. *Mutt and Jeff* was among the first strips built on a fixed cast of recurring characters appearing every day, a structural invention that directly shaped the comic book format when strips were later collected and reprinted as pamphlets.