Mutt and Jeff — c. 1909–1911

Six panels follow the lanky Mutt and his pint-sized partner Jeff through a street encounter on the Bowery. Mutt has apparently given Jeff a bottle of "nervine" tonic; Jeff, supercharged, grabs a passing stranger by the collar, flattens a police officer, and crashes through a brick wall — each impact rendered in Fisher's signature starburst-and-stars shorthand for comic violence. The final panel shows Mutt explaining to onlookers that Jeff simply overdosed on the stuff. Fisher's Mutt and Jeff, launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, was among the first strips built on a fixed cast of recurring characters appearing in daily installments — a structural invention that made the comic strip a narrative form, not merely a one-off joke, and laid the direct foundation for the comic book anthology format that followed two decades later.