Mutt and Jeff — 1910-01-20

Six horizontal panels follow the lanky, top-hatted Mutt and his tiny companion Jeff through a National Gallery visit that ends in slapstick humiliation. Mutt coaches Jeff to name-drop Van Dyke and Rembrandt before approaching a real Duke; the Duke, charmed, invites them to dine and inspect his collection — until he asks Jeff's favorite artist. Jeff's answer, 'Tad! Opper!', names two newspaper cartoonists, not old masters, and earns a boot out the door. Bud Fisher launched Mutt and Jeff in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1907, making it the first successful daily comic strip with a fixed cast. Its persistent characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons established conventions that would migrate directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.