Mutt and Jeff — 1909-10-27

Six horizontal panels follow the tall, mustachioed Mutt and his short companion Jeff as they investigate the disappearance of Judge Gander's Angora goat, named Rudie, last seen near Coney Island Jockey Club. The strip opens with a lost-notice parody, moves through comic interviews with a private-affairs man and the Judge himself, and closes with Little Jeff offering a knowing political explanation involving golf balls and moth balls. Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* — launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907 as a racing-tip strip — became America's first successful daily comic strip, pioneering the recurring cast, continuous narrative, and compressed panel-to-panel timing that would directly shape the comic book format two decades later.