Mutt and Jeff — 1909-12-17

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* was the first successful daily newspaper comic strip with a consistent cast, launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907. This strip follows the tall, scheming Mutt and his pint-sized foil Jeff through a quick-fire inheritance gag: Jeff's uncle has died leaving money, Mutt rushes him to buy steamship tickets to Europe, then steers him into a trunk store where Mutt pockets the commissions. Fisher's draftsmanship is economical — expressive silhouettes, loose crosshatching, speech balloons carrying punchy vernacular. The strip's six-panel sequence moves with tight comic timing. *Mutt and Jeff* ran until 1983, and its sustained daily format directly shaped the structural logic that early comic-book anthologies would later collect and codify.