Mutt and Jeff #6

History

Bud Fisher created the strip in 1907 as A. Mutt, a sports-page feature about a racetrack gambler; Jeff, introduced on March 27, 1908 as a diminutive asylum inmate with delusions of being boxing champion Jim Jeffries, transformed the strip into the tall-and-short comedy duo that became a national sensation under Hearst syndication before Fisher moved it to the Wheeler Syndicate in 1915. By the time this issue appeared in September 1919, Fisher had already largely delegated drawing duties to studio assistants — including Billy Liverpool and Ed Mack — while retaining the copyright he had famously protected in his own name from the very first strip. Cupples & Leon, a New York publisher already known for juvenile fiction and comic-strip collections, launched its distinctive 10" × 10" softcover format for Mutt and Jeff starting in 1919, reprinting daily strips from the Wheeler Syndicate in black-and-white four-panel-per-page layouts at roughly 48–52 pages per volume; this issue's content, per surviving copies, features strips in which a notable portion of the material engages with Army and wartime scenarios reflecting the recent World War I period.

Trivia · 7 facts

• Published September 20, 1919 by Cupples & Leon Company, New York — the sixth entry in what would become an at-least-18-volume softcover reprint series running through 1933.
• Written and created by Bud Fisher, cartoonist of the strip universally credited as the first successful American daily comic strip, debuting November 15, 1907.
• Characters indexed: Mutt (Augustus Mutt, tall racetrack gambler) and Jeff (short, introduced March 27, 1908), whose mismatched pairing gave English-language popular culture the enduring idiom for any tall-and-short pair.
• Source material: reprints of daily strips distributed by the Wheeler Syndicate (later Bell Syndicate), to which Fisher had moved the strip in September 1915 after a successful legal dispute with Hearst's King Features over strip ownership.
• Roughly half of the surviving copies' content reportedly features Mutt and Jeff in Army or wartime scenarios, reflecting Fisher's use of the strip to engage with World War I — Fisher himself served as a censor in London for the Canadian Army during the war.
• The Cupples & Leon 10"×10" softcover format launched specifically with this Mutt and Jeff series in 1919 and was later adopted for other strips including Bringing Up Father, representing a distinct evolution from earlier Mutt and Jeff reprint formats (Ball Publishing's 1910–c.1914 horizontal hardcovers).
• Mutt and Jeff characters appeared on the cover of Famous Funnies #1 (1934), the first modern-format monthly comic book, and later received their own DC Comics series (1939–1958, 103 issues) — making the Cupples & Leon books early waypoints in a franchise with direct lineage into the mainstream comic-book era.

Cast · 2 characters

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