Mutt and Jeff — 1909-12-14

Six slim panels follow the lanky, scheming Mutt as he cajoles the tiny, top-hatted Jeff into lending him coins, then pawns Jeff's coat at a pawnshop marked THE JADES. Jeff, humiliated and cold, watches helplessly while Mutt pockets the cash. A final panel shows Jeff soaking in a bathtub, pleading for more stew — the visual punchline landing through pure staging, no caption needed. Bud Fisher launched *A. Mutt* in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, making it the first successful daily comic strip — six days a week, continuous narrative, fixed characters. That disciplined format, built from speech balloons and sequential panels, directly seeded the anthology reprint pamphlets of the 1930s that became the comic book.