Mutt and Jeff — The Sun (New York), December 7, 1913

This page from The Sun (New York) carries the era's theater listings rather than a surviving comic strip image, yet its date places it squarely in the golden infancy of the American newspaper comic. Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff — launched in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1907 — was by 1913 the country's first successful daily comic strip, syndicating nationally and introducing the tall, gullible Mutt alongside his pint-sized, bowler-hatted partner Jeff. Fisher's strip codified what Outcault and Dirks had begun: sequential panels, speech balloons anchored to characters, and a recurring cast whose personality was the joke. Sunday pages like this one are the direct ancestors of the comic book format publishers would package and sell as standalone volumes within two decades.