Harry Conway "Bud" Fisher was a sports cartoonist for the
San Francisco Chronicle in the early 1900s, a time when a newspaper cartoon was single panel. His innovation was to tell a cartoon gag in a sequence, or strip, of panels, creating the first American comic strip to successfully pioneer that since-common format. The concept of a newspaper strip featuring recurring characters in multiple panels on a six-day-a-week schedule actually had been created by
Clare Briggs with
A. Piker Clerk four years earlier, but that short-lived effort did not inspire further comics in a comic-strip format. As comics historian
Don Markstein explained,
A. Mutt, the comic strip that became better known by its later title,
Mutt and Jeff, debuted on November 15, 1907 on the sports pages of the
San Francisco Chronicle. The featured character had previously appeared in sports cartoons by Fisher but was unnamed. Fisher had approached his editor,
John P. Young, about doing a regular strip as early as 1905, but was turned down. According to Fisher, Young told him, "It would take up too much room, and readers are used to reading down the page, and not horizontally". This strip focused on a single main character until the other half of the duo appeared on March 27, 1908. It appeared only in the
Chronicle, so Fisher did not have the extended lead time that syndicated strips require. Episodes were drawn the day before publication, and frequently referred to local events that were currently making headlines or to specific horse races being run that day. A 1908 sequence about Mutt's trial featured a parade of thinly-disguised caricatures of specific San Francisco political figures, many of whom were being prosecuted for
graft. On June 7, 1908, the strip moved off the sports pages and into
Hearst's
San Francisco Examiner where it was
syndicated by
King Features and became a national hit, subsequently making Fisher the first celebrity of the comics industry. Fisher had taken the precaution of
copyrighting the strip in his own name, facilitating the move to King Features and making it impossible for the
Chronicle to continue the strip using another artist. A dispute between Fisher and King Features arose in 1913, and Fisher moved his strip on September 15, 1915, to the
Wheeler Syndicate (later the
Bell Syndicate), who gave Fisher 60% of the gross revenue, an enormous income in those times. By 1916, Fisher was earning in excess of $150,000 a year. By the 1920s, merchandising and growing circulation had increased his income to an estimated $250,000. In 1918,
Mutt and Jeff added a
Sunday strip and, as success continued, Fisher became increasingly dependent on assistants to produce the work. Fisher hired Billy Liverpool and Ed Mack, artists Hearst had at one point groomed to take over the strip, who did most of the artwork. Other assistants on the strip included Ken Kling,
George Herriman, and
Maurice Sendak (while still in high school). Fisher appeared to lose all interest in the strip during the 1930s, and after Mack died in 1932, the job of creating the strip fell to Al Smith. In c. 1944, the new Chicago-based
Field Syndicate took over the strip.
Mutt and Jeff retained Fisher's signature until his death, however, so it wasn't until December 7, 1954, that the strip started being signed by Smith. Smith continued to draw
Mutt and Jeff until 1980, two years before it ceased publication. In the introduction to
Forever Nuts: The Early Years of Mutt & Jeff,
Allan Holtz gave the following reason for the strip's longevity and demise: During this final period it was drawn by George Breisacher. Currently,
Andrews McMeel Syndication continues to syndicate
Mutt and Jeff under the imprint
Classic Mutt and Jeff (in both English and Spanish language versions) under the copyright of
Pierre S. de Beaumont (1915–2010), founder of the
Brookstone catalog and retail chain. De Beaumont inherited ownership of the strip from his mother, Aedita de Beaumont, who married Fisher in 1925 (the couple parted after four weeks, but never divorced). ==Characters and story==