Mutt and Jeff — 1908-08-30

Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff was the first successful daily newspaper comic strip, running six days a week from 1907 onward and establishing the recurring-character serial as a commercial format. This strip, headlined "With Mutt in New York — You Can't Keep Him in the Hay," plays out across six panels in a hospital ward: the towering, scheming Mutt lies abed while a top-hatted Doc and Jeff look on; gag dialogue in hand-lettered speech balloons reveals Mutt was beaned with a billiard ball in an argument. The final panel has him sprinting to place a bet. Fisher's confident ink line, overlapping figures, and tightly paced balloon-to-balloon comedy directly shaped the visual grammar every subsequent cartoonist inherited.