Mutt and Jeff — 1909-11-23

Eight panels follow the lanky Mutt and his short companion Jeff through a vaudeville scheme in New York. Mutt has landed a tryout at Hammerstein's—forty weeks at $300 if the act succeeds—and plants Jeff in the audience to applaud on cue. Jeff, however, snags a box seat and promptly dozes off, leaving Mutt's stage turn greeted by silence. The final panels show Mutt's humiliation: a dotted line labeled 'absence of applause' traces his exit—via a swift kick. Bud Fisher launched *Mutt and Jeff* in 1907 as a daily strip, making it among the first continuous-character American comic strips. Its consistent cast, sequential daily panels, and speech balloons directly shaped the visual conventions that newspaper syndicates would carry into the first comic books two decades later.