Mutt and Jeff — 1909-11-27

Six panels track the mismatched duo through a classic switcheroo: tall, scheming Mutt acquires a bottle of "Nervine" meant to give him courage before confronting a massive opponent, only to be handed a hair tonic by mistake — leaving him bald and battered while the big man walks away unscathed. Fisher's line is economical and kinetic; speech balloons carry overlapping crosstalk, and the silent interim panel marked "And Meanwhile" shows the strip already mastering narrative ellipsis. Launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, *Mutt and Jeff* was the first successful daily newspaper comic strip with recurring characters — a direct ancestor of the comic book format that would crystallize when publishers began reprinting such strips in collected pamphlet form through the 1930s.