Mutt and Jeff is an American newspaper comic strip created by Bud Fisher in 1907. It is commonly believed to be 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. It remained in syndication until 1982, over time created by several cartoonists, chiefly Al Smith who drew the strip for nearly 50 years. The series became a comic book (initially published by All-American Publications and later by DC Comics, Dell Comics and Harvey Comics), as well as cartoons, films, merchandising and reprints.

A Mutt and Jeff strip from 1913

Publication history

Under its initial title, A. Mutt 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."¹

This strip focused on a single main character, until the other half of the duo appeared on 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 big celebrity of the comics industry.²

San Francisco Chronicle advertisement for Mutt and Jeff in Overland Monthly, January 1916³

Mutt and Jeff book collection of comic strips (1919)

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 Wheeler Syndicate (later Bell Syndicate), who gave Fisher 60% of the gross revenue, an enormous income in those times.² Hearst responded by launching a lawsuit which ultimately failed.⁴ 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 became 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 would do most of the artwork.⁵⁶ Other assistants on the strip included Ken Kling, George Herriman, and Maurice Sendak while still in high school.⁷⁸

Smith authorship

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.⁹¹⁰ The strip retained Fisher's signature until his death, however, and not until December 7, 1954 was the strip signed by Smith.⁴

A spin-off strip, Cicero's Cat, starred Desdemona, a cat that Smith originally introduced in 1933 as companion to Mutt's son Cicero. This strip was a "topper" a Sunday-only feature that was packaged with the Sunday version of the main strip.

Al Smith received the National Cartoonists Society Humor Comic Strip Award in 1968 for his work on the strip.¹¹ Smith continued to draw the 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:

The strip's waning circulation got a shot in the arm in the 1950s when President Eisenhower sang its praises, and then again in the 1970s when a nostalgia craze swept the nation. It took the 1980s, a decade focused on the here and now, and a final creative change on the strip when even Al Smith had had enough, to finally allow the strip the rest it had deserved for decades.¹²

During this final period it was drawn by George Breisacher.¹³ Currently, Andrews McMeel Universal continues to syndicate Mutt and Jeff under the imprint Classic Mutt and Jeff (in both English and Spanish language versions) under the signature of Pierre S. De Beaumont.

Characters

Augustus Mutt is a tall, dimwitted racetrack character, a fanatic horse-race gambler, who is motivated by greed. Mutt has a wife and a son, Cicero, whose cat starred in the Mutt and Jeff spin-off strip Cicero's Cat. Mutt encounters the half-pint Jeff, an inmate of an insane asylum, who shares the passion for horseracing. They appeared in more and more strips together until the strip abandoned the horse-race theme and concentrated on Mutt's other get-rich-quick schemes, with Jeff as a sometimes unwilling partner. Jeff, sometimes called Little Jeff, has no last name, stating his name is "just Jeff — first and last and always it's Jeff." He has a twin brother named Julius; they look so much alike that Jeff, who can't 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. Friends of Mutt and Jeff have included Gus Geevem, Joe Spivis and the English Sir Sidney.

The original inspiration for the character of "Jeff" was Jacques "Jakie" Fehr, a tiny (4'8") 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 got off the train 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.

Comic books

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. In 1939, DC gave them their own comic book, published until 1958. The DC run consisted entirely of strip reprints. Dell Comics took over the feature after DC dropped it, but their tenure only lasted one year. Many of the Dell issues featuring conventional-length stories newly drawn by Smith. Harvey Comics which had several other comic strip reprint comics running at the time picked up Mutt and Jeff from Dell Comics, and this version of the comic ran through part of 1965. During these later versions, Smith's creation Cicero's Cat, was also included.

Comics publisher NBM has announced a reprint volume of Forever Nuts: The Early Years of Mutt & Jeff.¹²

Film adaptations

Mutt and Jeff in "Dog Gone" (1926)

In 1910, during the silent film era, at David Horsley's Nestor Comedies in Bayonne, New Jersey, Al Christie began turning out one single reel of a live action Mutt and Jeff comedy picture every week. In 1916, Fisher licensed the production of "Mutt and Jeff" for animation with pioneers Raoul Barre' and Charles Bowers. The animated series lasted 11 years and more than 300 animated Mutt and Jeff shorts were released, making it the longest running theatrical animated film series second to Krazy Kat. (Popeye appeared in fewer film cartoons, a total of 120 produced over a 24 year period. But there were more "Popeye" cartoons combined with the theatrical and television productions.)

Home video

In 2005, Inkwell Images released a DVD documentary entitled Mutt and Jeff: the Original Animated Odd Couple; included on the disc are several Mutt and Jeff animated cartoons.¹⁴ Also, individual M&J cartoons have been mixed with other titles on low-cost video collections, such as the Cartoon Craze DVDs from Digiview Entertainment.

Influences in culture

Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles. (July 2008)

• "Mutt and Jeff" became idiomatic for any tall-and-short pair of men (Mutt was the tall one). The word "mutton" is used in Cockney rhyming slang as an abbreviation of "Mutt'n'Jeff", and stands for the word "deaf".¹⁵
• The "good cop/bad cop" police interrogation tactic is also called "Mutt and Jeff".¹⁵
• Marcel Duchamp signed his very influential early work Fountain as "R. Mutt 1917".
• The names were used as codenames for a pair of World War II spies, Mutt and Jeff.
• The combination of the Victory Medal and British War Medal, awarded to soldiers in the British Army for service in the first World War, was also known as a "Mutt and Jeff." The Victory Medal was awarded to those who entered a theater of war, and the British War medal was awarded to soldiers who left their own land.
• The Australian cricketers Bill Woodfull and Bill Ponsford formed a famous batting partnership during the late 1920s and 1930s, and were nicknamed "Mutt and Jeff," although it was never clear which one was which.
• The film Racing with the Moon (1984) about two close friends (Nicolas Cage, Sean Penn) in 1943 includes a scene with a copy of a Mutt and Jeff comic book as both a period artifact and a reference to the friendship depicted in the movie.

Sources

Footnotes

External links

• The Classic Mutt and Jeff strips gocomics