Mutt and Jeff — 1909-11-20

Six panels follow the lanky, impoverished Mutt through a New York haberdashery where overcoats run to $300 and beaver hats to $7.85—prices that flatten his ambitions at every counter. The gag culminates outside, where a well-dressed stranger turns out to be Jeff, the tiny asylum escapee Mutt knows well, now inexplicably flush. Fisher's strip, launched in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1907, was among the first daily comic strips built around a fixed cast of recurring characters. Its consistent six-panel horizontal format, integrated speech balloons, and personality-driven comedy—rather than single-gag sight humor—directly shaped the visual grammar that newspaper syndicates would standardize and that early comic-book publishers would later reprint verbatim as their first product.