Mutt and Jeff — 1909-12-10

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* strip here follows the lanky Mutt tutoring his brother Ima in New York street fashion, only for Ima to be accosted — and apparently squeezed flat — by a pair of city toughs. Fisher draws in confident brush line: top hats, canes, striped suits, exaggerated body language, and speech balloons carrying the rhythm of vaudeville patter across seven panels. Launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907 as a horse-racing strip, *Mutt and Jeff* became one of the first daily comic strips to use a fixed cast in continuous narrative — a structural invention that pointed directly toward the comic book format that would consolidate these newspaper pages into pamphlets by the 1930s.