Mutt and Jeff — The Sun (New York), April 6, 1919

This page from The Sun (New York) does not reproduce the comic strip itself but rather the theatre amusements section surrounding it — a reminder that Sunday newspaper pages bundled comics, advertisements, and cultural listings into a single broadsheet experience. Mutt and Jeff, created by Bud Fisher in 1907, was among the first daily comic strips to run continuously with the same cast: the lanky, hapless Augustus Mutt and his pint-sized companion Jeff, whose mismatched pairing drove a reliable gag engine across six panels. Fisher pioneered the strip's horizontal daily format and locked in recurring characters as the strip's commercial engine — a structural invention the entire comic-book industry would later inherit directly from these newspaper pages.