Mutt and Jeff — 1910-01-28

Six panels follow the mismatched pair—lanky, top-hatted Mutt and tiny Jeff—through a Paris street encounter. Mutt boasts he knows how Frenchmen fight: a slam to the chin. He picks a small Frenchman to demonstrate on Jeff, receives an immediate right hook for his trouble, and ends the strip face-down while a bystander notes the doctor forbids visitors. Fisher's linework is loose and kinetic; the gag turns entirely on physical humiliation, timed across panels like a vaudeville beat. *Mutt and Jeff*, launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, was among the first strips built around a fixed cast in daily continuity—a direct structural ancestor of the comic book page, proving that recurring characters and sequential panels could sustain a mass readership indefinitely.