From the exhibition
Mutt and Jeff — "He Tries the Ticket Scalping Game"
· c. 1909–1912

Six horizontal panels follow the lanky, top-hatted Mutt and his short companion Jeff through a ticket-scalping scheme centered on the Yale–Harvard football game. Mutt buys 500 tickets at $1, intends to resell them at a profit, and pauses mid-strip to consult a giant bottle of Nervine — drawn as a full-panel "actual photo" gag — before the box office sells out and his scheme collapses. Bud Fisher's loose, energetic pen line and stacked speech balloons are textbook early American newspaper-strip grammar. Fisher launched *Mutt and Jeff* in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, making it among the first daily strips with a recurring cast — a direct ancestor of the comic book format that packaged such strips into pamphlet reprints by the 1930s.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain