Mutt and Jeff — 1909-10-24

Six panels follow the lanky, mustachioed Mutt and his pint-sized companion Jeff through a political farce: Mutt exits a Gander meeting boasting of his mayoralty candidate, Judge Gander takes the podium while neighborhood horses bolt from his oratory, and successive observers—a spectator overcome by gas, a California seismologist recording three distinct shocks, and Jeff himself, political advisor—each report comic catastrophe triggered by the speech. Fisher's confident pen-line caricatures, sequential thought-gags, and speech balloons running below each panel represent the *daily* strip form he pioneered from 1907 onward in the *San Francisco Chronicle*. Mutt and Jeff was among the first strips with a fixed cast appearing every day, establishing the recurring-character serial that would become the structural backbone of the American newspaper page—and, eventually, the comic book.