Mutt and Jeff — "Little Jeff Goes on the Stump"

Six horizontal panels follow the lanky Mutt and tiny Jeff through a political-rally gag: Mutt pins a feather duster to Jeff's chin as a fake beard so Jeff can impersonate a judge at a Tammany-style campaign meeting. At the podium, Jeff freezes in a loop of stammered "Ladies and gentlemen — er — a —" while the crowd heckles him off the stage in the final panel. Bud Fisher launched *Mutt and Jeff* in 1907 in the *San Francisco Chronicle*, making it the first successful daily comic strip built around a fixed cast and continuous storyline. Its slim vertical characters, rhythmic speech balloons, and six-beat panel timing directly shaped the visual conventions that newspaper syndicates would soon export nationwide — the formal DNA from which the comic book would later grow.