Mutt and Jeff — 1909-10-22

Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff ran as a daily strip beginning 1907 in the San Francisco Chronicle, making it among the first comic strips built around a fixed cast of recurring characters — a cornerstone innovation in the medium. This strip follows the tall, mustachioed Mutt and his small companion Jeff through a six-panel political farce involving a Judge Gander, a mayoral race, and a skeptical unnamed statesman. Fisher uses speech balloons fluidly across panels, with captions anchoring scene and character. The visual rhythm — wide establishing shots giving way to close reaction panels — demonstrates the sequential grammar Fisher helped codify. These newspaper dailies, collected and reprinted from 1911 onward, are the direct ancestors of the comic book format itself.