Mutt and Jeff — 1909-10-23

Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff began in 1907 as a racing-tip strip and quickly became America's first successful daily comic strip with a fixed cast of recurring characters. This panel—"Who Is Otto Barnyard?"—runs Mutt through a political satire involving a mystery candidate, deploying a string of pompous functionaries: a private detective, a pie-trust president, a judge, and a reporter, each rendered in Fisher's economical ink line with speech balloons carrying the comedy. A "Ladies' Corner" sub-strip by Hortense Debris occupies the upper right. Fisher's daily continuity format directly shaped what publishers would soon bind into pamphlets, making strips like this literal ancestors of the comic book as a physical object.