Mutt and Jeff — 1909-11-29

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* strip here runs six panels across a single tier, the standard daily-strip format Fisher helped establish. Tall, gullible Mutt tells short Jeff he has a plan: buy a bottle of patent medicine called "Nervine," march home, and finally assert himself over his wife. Jeff approves; Mutt strides to the door — and is immediately chased out, battered, by a flying frying pan and a formidable Mrs. Mutt. Final panel: Mutt staggers out, defeated. Fisher launched the strip in 1907 as *A. Mutt* in the *San Francisco Chronicle*, making it among the first successful daily comic strips with a recurring cast — a direct precursor to the comic-book format that would codify newspaper strip conventions into bound pages by the 1930s.