Mutt and Jeff — 1909-10-03

Six horizontal panels follow the lanky Mutt and tiny Jeff through a New York street hustle: Mutt, broke and desperate to cover a bet, whispers a secret scheme to Jeff, who kneels and performs what appears to be a dentistry con on a passerby outside a shoe shop, extracting coins before sprinting off. Fisher's line work is confident and kinetic — figures lean, tumble, and dash with rubber-limbed energy. Speech balloons carry the full comedic load, the punchline landing on a bookmaker's betting odds. Launched in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1907, Mutt and Jeff was among the first daily comic strips with a continuous cast, running six days a week and proving that recurring characters could sustain a newspaper franchise — a structural blueprint the comic-book form would later inherit wholesale.