Mutt and Jeff — 1909-10-02

"With Mutt in New York — He Pursues the Inside 'Info'" is a full Sunday page by Bud Fisher, creator of Mutt and Jeff, America's first successful daily comic strip (launched 1907 in the San Francisco Chronicle). Here the lanky schemer Mutt tails a bicycle messenger through New York streets from 14th to 103rd Street, desperate to intercept a telegraph note that turns out to be a tip on a horse named St. Jeanne. Fisher's nine-panel grid — clean ink line, expressive silhouettes, speech balloons driving the chase — exemplifies the visual grammar that Sunday newspaper pages were simultaneously standardizing and popularizing. Those pages, collected and reprinted as cheap pamphlets through the 1930s, directly seeded the comic book format.