Mutt and Jeff


Mutt and Jeff is a long-running American newspaper comic strip created by cartoonist Bud Fisher in 1907 about "two mismatched tinhorns". It is commonly regarded as the first daily comic strip. The concept of a newspaper strip featuring recurring characters in multiple panels on a six-day-a-week schedule had previously been pioneered through the short-lived A. Piker Clerk by Clare Briggs, but it was Mutt and Jeff as the first successful daily comic strip that staked out the direction of the future trend.
Mutt and Jeff remained in syndication until 1983, employing the talents of several cartoonists, chiefly Al Smith who drew the strip for nearly fifty years. The series eventually became a comic book, initially published by All-American Publications and later published by DC Comics, Dell Comics and Harvey Comics. Later it was also published as cartoons, films, pop culture merchandise and reprints. Its impact on popular culture is such that, even today, the phrase "Mutt and Jeff" is often used to jokingly refer to any pair of individuals of different sizes.

Syndicated success

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, who gave Fisher 60% of the gross revenue, an enormous income in those times. Hearst responded by launching a lawsuit which ultimately failed. 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.
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.
Al Smith received the National Cartoonists Society Humor Comic Strip Award in 1968 for his work on the strip. 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 under the copyright of Pierre S. de Beaumont, 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.
Image:Mutt and Jeff - motorcycle cop.jpg|thumb|610px|A Mutt and Jeff strip from 1913.

Characters and story

Augustus Mutt is a tall, dimwitted racetrack character—a fanatic horse-race gambler who is motivated by greed. Mutt has a wife, known only as Mrs. Mutt. The Mutts's son was named Cicero. Mutt first encountered the half-pint Jeff, an inmate of an insane asylum who shares his passion for horse racing, in 1908. They appeared in more strips together until the strip abandoned the horse-race theme to concentrate on Mutt's other outlandish, get-rich-quick schemes. Jeff usually served as a partner. Jeff was short, bald as a billiard ball, and had mutton chop sideburns. He has no last name, stating his name is "just Jeff—first and last and always it's Jeff". However, at one point late in the strip's life, he is identified in the address of a cablegram as "Othello Jeff". He has a twin brother named Julius. They look so much alike that Jeff, who cannot afford to have a portrait painted, sits for Julius, who is too busy to pose. Rarely does Jeff change from his habitual outfit of top hat and suit with wing collar shirt. Friends of Mutt and Jeff have included Gus Geevem, Joe Spivis, and the English Sir Sidney. Characteristic lines and catchphrases that appeared often during the run of the strip included "Nix, Mutt, nix!", "For the love of Mike!" and "Oowah!"
The original inspiration for the character of "Jeff" was Jacques "Jakie" Fehr, a tiny irascible Swiss-born shopkeeper in the village of Occidental, California. One summer day in 1908, Fisher, a member of San Francisco's Bohemian Club, was riding the North Pacific Coast narrow gauge railway passenger train northbound to the Bohemian Grove, the club's summer campsite. During a stop in Occidental, Fisher disembarked in order to stretch his legs and observed the diminutive walrus-moustached Fehr in heated altercation with the tall and lanky "candy butcher", who sold refreshments on the train and also distributed newspapers to shops in towns along the train route. The comic potential in this scene prompted Fisher to add the character of Jeff to his A. Mutt comic strip, with great success.

Interactions with real people

A recurring theme in the strip has the two characters interacting with celebrities, including sports figures, actors, and politicians. They often refer to these real-life people in a chummy way, such as actor "Doug" Fairbanks and President "Herb" Hoover. Sometimes they interact with the author, as shown in this 1924 comic in which Fisher includes a caricature of himself.

''Cicero's Cat''

Starting on October 27, 1926, the Sunday page included a topper strip about Cicero, Mutt's son. On December 3, 1933, the topper began to focus on Cicero's pet, Desdemona. Under the title Cicero's Cat, this pantomime strip ran until 1972.

Comic books and reprints

  • The Cupples & Leon Company produced at least 18 reprint collections of Mutt and Jeff daily strips, in 10" x 10" softcover books from 1919 to 1933. They also published two larger hardcover editions, Mutt and Jeff BIG Book and Mutt and Jeff BIG Book No. 2.
  • Mutt and Jeff also appeared in comic books. They were featured on the front cover of Famous Funnies #1, the first modern format comic book, and reprints appeared in DC Comics' All American Comics. It has been suggested that some of the Mutt and Jeff material published by DC Comics were new stories drawn by Sheldon Mayer.
  • In 1939, DC gave them their own comic book, published until 1958 for 103 issues, that consisted entirely of newspaper reprints. Dell Comics took over the feature after DC dropped it, but their tenure only lasted for one year and 12 issues. Many of the Dell issues featured new, conventional-length stories drawn by Smith.
  • Harvey Comics, which had several other comic strip reprint comics running at the time, picked up Mutt and Jeff from Dell, and this version of the comic ran to 1965 for a total of 33 issues, plus two short-lived spinoff titles: Mutt & Jeff Jokes and Mutt & Jeff New Jokes. These later versions also included Smith's Cicero's Cat.
  • In 2007, comics publisher NBM published a reprint volume, Forever Nuts: The Early Years of Mutt & Jeff.

    Stage shows and sheet music

  • Mutt and Jeff: A Musical Comedy Song Book Songs include: "The Barn-Yard Rag"; "Sail on Silv'ry Moon"; "Mr. Ragtime Whippoorwill"; "Oh You Girl!"; "A Mother Old and Gray"; "Let Me Call You Sweetheart"; "Years Years Ago"; "If I Forget"; "Bohemia Rag"; "Undertaker Man"; "Tell Me That You Love Me"
  • The Face in the Flag I Love
  • At the Funny Page Ball
  • Mutt and Jeff on Their Honeymoon Songs include: "My Dearie"; "My Dixie Rose"; "The Wild Irish Rose That God Gave Me"; "Why Can't My Dreams Come True"; "Just One Little Smile"; "Songs My Mother Sang to Me"; "When Someone Dreams of Someone"; "When I Am Dreaming of You"
  • Mutt and Jeff: And They Called It the Funny Sheet Blues
  • ''Mutt and Jeff Songster''