Mutt and Jeff — 1909-12-11

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* began as a daily racing-tip strip in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, making it one of the first true daily comic strips with a continuous cast. This installment features a running gag built across sequential panels: the lanky Mutt advises his rotund companion Ima to adopt a carefree philosophy, then delivers increasingly catastrophic news — bank failure, a dying sister, burglars, a brother shot — while Ima responds with unbroken laughter. Fisher's confident ink line, expressive figures, and crisp speech balloons demonstrate the visual grammar newspaper strips were then codifying. Syndicated nationally and wildly popular, *Mutt and Jeff* directly shaped the anthology reprint pamphlets of the 1930s that became the first comic books.