Mutt and Jeff — 1908-08-12

Six panels follow the lanky, perpetually hapless Mutt through a domestic crisis in New York: after his horse is scratched at the races, he squares off against his wife wielding a rolling pin, pleads for one minute's mercy, and finally raids the sugar jar where she has hidden the bankroll — bolting in triumph while she rails behind him. Fisher's linework is loose and kinetic, speech balloons packed tight with vernacular argument. Mutt and Jeff launched in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1907 as the first successful daily comic strip with a recurring cast, running six days a week and proving that serialized cartoon characters could anchor newspaper circulation — a commercial and formal discovery that made the eventual comic book anthology not just possible but inevitable.