Mutt and Jeff — 1909-10-30

Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff launched in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1907, making it among the first successful daily newspaper comic strips built around recurring characters. This strip, headlined "With Mutt in New York — He Introduces Campaign Songs," unfolds across six panels in Fisher's loose, energetic ink line. Mutt performs a mock music-hall number — "Don't Go in Them Tigers' Cage Tonight" — complete with printed verse, chorus, and second verse beneath the panels, blending sequential storytelling with song parody. A tiger in a Tammany Hall cage and a strutting finale figure anchor the political joke. Fisher's consistent character designs and integrated speech balloons helped establish the visual grammar that newspaper comic pages handed directly to the first comic books of the 1930s.