Mutt and Jeff — 1909-11-20

Six panels follow the lanky, impoverished Mutt through a New York haberdashery where overcoats run to $300 and beaver hats to $7.85—prices that flatten his ambitions at every counter. The gag culminates outside, where a well-dressed stranger turns out to be Jeff, the tiny asylum escapee Mutt knows well, now inexplicably flush. Fisher's strip, launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, was among the first daily comic strips built around a fixed cast of recurring characters. Its consistent six-panel horizontal format, integrated speech balloons, and personality-driven comedy—rather than single-gag sight humor—directly shaped the visual grammar that newspaper syndicates would standardize and that early comic-book publishers would later reprint verbatim as their first product.