Mutt and Jeff — "Mutt Hears a Funny Story"

Six panels follow the lanky Mutt and his diminutive friend Jeff through a classic shaggy-dog loop: Mutt tries to relay a joke about a French duel—"one had a gun *that* long"—but Jeff's door remains unanswered until a small armored figure (a can opener, the last panel reveals) deflects the punchline entirely. Bud Fisher launched *Mutt and Jeff* in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, making it arguably the first true daily narrative comic strip with recurring characters. Its horizontal panel grid, integrated speech balloons, and serialized gag structure directly shaped the conventions that daily newspaper strips—and soon the comic book format assembled from reprinted pages—would carry forward for decades.