Mutt and Jeff — 1909-11-18

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* began as a daily racing-tip strip in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1907, making it among the first American comics with a fixed cast of recurring characters appearing in continuous daily installments — a structural invention that shaped everything after. This strip shows the con-man tall Mutt dispatching his tiny, top-hatted partner Jeff to fleece a group of marks near what appears to be a horse show, while Mutt hides behind a tree. The final panels tally winnings and losses in itemized columns, the strip's characteristic bookkeeping gag. Fisher's bold brushwork, expressive silhouettes, and tightly sequenced panels demonstrate the visual grammar — action-to-action cuts, speech balloons carrying full comedic weight — that newspaper syndicates would soon package into the first comic books.