Mutt and Jeff

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* strip shows the towering, mustachioed Mutt delivering a joke to a stiff-coated Englishman across seven panels, with little top-hatted Jeff contributing physical punctuation at ankle height. The Englishman's baffled question marks say everything; the punchline lands in pantomime as both men walk away baffled. Fisher drew with loose, confident ink lines and timed his panels like vaudeville beats — hold, reaction, exit. Launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, *Mutt and Jeff* was among the first daily comic strips to run a continuous recurring cast, pioneering the comedic-duo format and demonstrating that newspaper strips could sustain narrative momentum across days and weeks, laying essential groundwork for the collected comic book that would follow.