Mutt and Jeff

Six horizontal panels show the ongoing feud between lanky schemer Mutt and his cohort Jeff, here tangled in a mock-political assassination plot involving a caged bird labeled 'Baby Jack' and an explosive device. Caricatured figures declaim in dense caption boxes and early speech balloons; a diagram panel labels the bird cage with dotted lines, and a final panel delivers the punchline straight to camera. Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff, launched in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1907, was among the first strips built around a fixed cast returning daily — the structural move that transformed newspaper cartoon pages from one-off jokes into serialized narrative. Fisher's insistent use of recurring characters and cliffhanger continuity directly seeded what would become the comic-book form.