Mutt and Jeff — "Gay Paree Jolts Little Jeff's Nerves"

Six wordless panels track the diminutive Jeff navigating a Paris street, suitcase in hand, repeatedly startled—by a passing woman, a small dog, finally a honking automobile that sends him airborne. A sign reading *Très Mauvais* punctuates the chaos. Bud Fisher's linework is loose and kinetic; question-mark thought balloons carry all the narrative weight without a word of dialogue. Fisher launched Mutt and Jeff in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1907, making it among the first strips with a fixed cast appearing daily—a structural leap that transformed newspaper cartooning from single-panel gag art into sequential storytelling. Those daily strips, bound and sold from 1910 onward, are the direct ancestor of the comic book format.