Mutt and Jeff — "No Mushrooms for Mutt in France"

Six panels follow the lanky Mutt and his short companion Jeff through a French restaurant where Mutt cannot make the waiter understand the word *mushroom*. Jeff mimes, draws a picture, and finally opens an umbrella — which the waiter mistakes for the vegetable entirely, earning Mutt a knock on the head. Bud Fisher launched *A. Mutt* in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, making it among the first strips with a consistent daily cast — a foundational move toward the recurring-character comic that would define the form. Fisher's clean pen line, tight panel rhythm, and speech balloons carrying distinct comic timing were exactly the visual grammar later comic books inherited wholesale from the newspaper page.