Mutt and Jeff — 1909-10-07

Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff strip follows the lanky, scheming Mutt as he attempts a prize aviation contest over New York, negotiating his fee in advance before takeoff — a running joke on his mercenary nerve. Six panels track his flight arc, the encouraging crowd, then the hapless wrong-turn crash into a fence, ending with the sardonic caption about winning prize money in ruins. Fisher's loose, energetic brushwork and naturalistic speech balloons packed with vernacular dialogue typify the daily strip format he helped pioneer. Launched in 1907 in the San Francisco Chronicle, Mutt and Jeff was among the first strips built around a fixed cast of recurring characters across consecutive daily episodes — the structural model that would eventually migrate into the comic book pamphlet format of the 1930s.