Mutt and Jeff — "With Mutt in London: He Has a Tiff with Jeff"

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* was the first successful six-days-a-week newspaper comic strip, launching in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907 and syndicating nationwide within two years. This strip deposits the mismatched pair — lanky, scheming Mutt and tiny, bowler-hatted Jeff — in London, where Mutt attempts a cockney accent ("Aaften tea, a bit of a strull") and promptly baffles Jeff across eight brisk panels. Fisher's visual grammar is already confident: uniform panel gutters, speech balloons keyed to character height, and a sight-gag payoff built through cumulative misunderstanding. That grammar — recurring cast, sequential panels, balloon dialogue — is precisely what newspaper strips bequeathed to the comic book format that crystallized by the late 1930s.