Mutt & Jeff #119

History

Harvey Comics acquired the title from Dell after Dell's brief 12-issue run ended, picking up at issue #116 in February 1960 and continuing the numbering without interruption — a chain that itself traced back through DC Comics all the way to 1939. The actual creative labor throughout the Harvey run fell to Al Smith, born Albert Schmidt in Brooklyn, who had been ghosting Mutt and Jeff since 1932 under Fisher's name; by the time issue #119 appeared, Smith had only been signing his own name for roughly six years, following Fisher's 1954 death. Harvey edited the series under Alfred Harvey, publishing under the Harvey Publications, Inc. indicia on standard Silver Age newsprint in saddle-stitched format, typically running 32 pages in full color at a ten-cent cover price, and bundling in Smith's companion pantomime strip Cicero's Cat alongside the main feature.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published by Harvey Publications, Inc. circa 1960, as part of the Harvey run that spanned issues #116–#148 (February 1960 – November 1965), totalling 33 issues.
• Numbering continues unbroken from the Dell series (which ended at #115) and before that the DC Comics series (1939–1958, 103 issues), making this issue part of one of the longest consecutively numbered strip-adaptation runs in American comics.
• Primary art and story credited to Al Smith, who had been the strip's sole working cartoonist since 1932 — first as an uncredited ghost under Bud Fisher's name, then under his own signature after Fisher's death on September 7, 1954.
• The strip being adapted — Mutt and Jeff, originally titled A. Mutt — is widely regarded by historians as the first successful American daily comic strip, debuting November 15, 1907, in the San Francisco Chronicle.
• Each Harvey issue in this run included Smith's Cicero's Cat backup strip, a silent pantomime 'topper' originally introduced in 1933 starring Desdemona, the cat belonging to Mutt's son Cicero.
• The cover title reads 'Mutt and Jeff' while the indicia identifies the series as 'Mutt & Jeff' — a distinction noted in the Grand Comics Database across all 33 Harvey issues.
• Issue #119 carries no confirmed printed cover date in available records; GoCollect lists it as 'Unknown Date' sandwiched between #118 (April 1960) and #120 (August 1960), suggesting a June 1960 on-sale window.
• Harvey's acquisition of the title was consistent with its broader strategy of running multiple newspaper-strip reprint comics simultaneously; the Mutt & Jeff run also spawned two short-lived Harvey spinoffs: Mutt & Jeff Jokes and Mutt & Jeff New Jokes.