| Mutt and Jeff | |
|---|---|
 Overland Monthly ad (January 1916).[1] | |
| Author(s) |
|
| Website | gocomics |
| Current status/schedule | Concluded; reruns |
| Launch date | November 15, 1907 |
| End date | June 26, 1983 |
| Alternate name(s) | A. Mutt |
| Syndicate(s) |
|
| Genre(s) | Humor |
Mutt and Jeff is a long-running and widely popularAmerican newspapercomic strip created bycartoonistBud Fisher in 1907 about "two mismatchedtinhorns". It is commonly regarded as the firstdaily 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-livedA. Piker Clerk byClare Briggs, but it wasMutt 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, chieflyAl Smith who drew the strip for nearly fifty years. The series eventually became acomic book, initially published byAll-American Publications and later published byDC Comics,Dell Comics andHarvey Comics. Later it was also published ascartoons, films, pop culturemerchandise and reprints.
Harry Conway "Bud" Fisher was a sports cartoonist for theSan 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 byClare Briggs withA. Piker Clerk four years earlier, but that short-lived effort did not inspire further comics in a comic-strip format. As comics historianDon Markstein explained,
Fisher's comic strip was very similar toA. Piker Clerk, which cartoonist Clare Briggs ... had done in the very same daily format forThe Chicago American in 1903. But tho Fisher was born in Chicago, it's unknown whether or not he ever saw the Briggs strip, so let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say he had an idea. Despite the Briggs primacy,A. Mutt is considered the first daily strip because it's the one that sparked a trend in that direction, which continues to this day.[2]
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 theSan 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".[3]
This strip focused on a single main character until the other half of the duo appeared on March 27, 1908. It appeared only in theChronicle, 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 forgraft.
On June 7, 1908, the strip moved off the sports pages and intoHearst'sSan Francisco Examiner where it wassyndicated byKing Features and became a national hit, subsequently making Fisher the first celebrity of the comics industry.[2] Fisher had taken the precaution ofcopyrighting the strip in his own name, facilitating the move to King Features and making it impossible for theChronicle 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 theWheeler Syndicate (later theBell 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.[5]
In 1918,Mutt and Jeff added aSunday 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.[6][7] Other assistants on the strip included Ken Kling,George Herriman, andMaurice Sendak (while still in high school).[8][9]
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.[10][11] In c. 1944, the new Chicago-basedField 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.[4]
Al Smith received theNational Cartoonists SocietyHumor Comic Strip Award in 1968 for his work on the strip.[12] Smith continued to drawMutt and Jeff until 1980, two years before it ceased publication.
In the introduction toForever 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.[13]
During this final period it was drawn by George Breisacher.[14] Currently,Andrews McMeel Syndication continues to syndicateMutt and Jeff under the imprintClassic Mutt and Jeff (in both English and Spanish language versions) under the copyright ofPierre S. de Beaumont (1915–2010), founder of theBrookstone catalog and retail chain. De Beaumont inherited ownership of the strip from his mother, Aedita de Beaumont,[15] who married Fisher in 1925 (the couple parted after four weeks, but never divorced).[16]
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Augustus Mutt is a tall, dimwitted racetrack character—a fanatic horse-race gambler who is motivated by greed. Mutt has a wife, known only asMrs. Mutt (Mutt always addressed her as "M'love"; Al Smith revealed in aBoston Globe newspaper column that her first name wasIma – and conceded that he did not use it often because it was not a complimentary name). The Mutts's son was namedCicero. Mutt first encountered the half-pintJeff, 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 (sometimes unwilling) partner. Jeff was short, bald as a billiard ball, and hadmutton 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 namedJulius. 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 includedGus Geevem,Joe Spivis, and the EnglishSir Sidney. Characteristic lines andcatchphrases that appeared often during the run of the strip included "Nix, Mutt, nix!", "For the love of Mike!" and "Oowah!"[citation needed]
The original inspiration for the character of "Jeff" was Jacques "Jakie" Fehr, a tiny (4 ft 8 in (142 cm)) irascible Swiss-born shopkeeper in the village of Occidental, California. One summer day in 1908, Fisher, a member of San Francisco'sBohemian Club, was riding the North Pacific Coast narrow gauge railway passenger train northbound to theBohemian 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 hisA. Mutt comic strip, with great success.
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.
Starting on October 27, 1926, the Sunday page included atopper strip about Cicero, Mutt's son. On December 3, 1933, the topper began to focus on Cicero's pet, Desdemona. Under the titleCicero's Cat, this pantomime strip ran until 1972.[17]
In early July 1911, during thesilent era of motion pictures, atDavid Horsley'sNestor Comedies inBayonne, New Jersey,Al Christie began turning out a weekly one-reel live-actionMutt and Jeffcomedyshort, which was based on the comic strip.
TheMutt and Jeffserial was extremely popular and after the Nestor Company established astudio inHollywood, in late October 1911, Christie continued to oversee a weekly production of a one-reel episode.
In the fall of 1911, Nestor began using an alternate method of displaying theintertitles in theMutt and Jeff comedies. Instead of acut to the dialogue titles, the dialogue was displayed at the bottom of the image on a black background so the audience could read them as asubtitle, which was similar to the way they appeared in the cartoon strips. Horsley was very proud of the device and claimed to have entered a patent on it. He advertised theMutt and Jeff movies as "talking pictures".[18]
The first actors to portray Mutt and Jeff in the comedy shorts were Sam D. Drane, a tall man noted for his resemblance toPresident Lincoln, whom he actually played in his last movie,The Crisis (1916), as A. Mutt, and Gus Alexander, whose nickname was "Shorty," as Jeff. When Alexander left the serial, Christie hired the actorBud Duncan. Duncan played Jeff in two installments before the serial ended in 1912.[19]
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In 1916,[20] Fisher licensed the production ofMutt and Jeff for animation with pioneersCharles Bowers andRaoul Barré of theBarré Studio. The animated series lasted 11 years and more than 300 animatedMutt and Jeff shorts were released by theFox Film Corporation, making it the longest continuing theatrical animated movie serial and second longest toKrazy Kat.[21]
In 1971, a feature film was released consisting of eleven redrawn colorized Mutt and Jeff silent films, with the shortSlick Sleuths used as the frame, titledThe Weird Adventures of Mutt & Jeff and Bugoff, which added new dialogue and soundtrack songs. In this film, Mutt and Jeff are USA government agents, and they have been assigned to track down SMOGPOO's top secret agent Bugoff, a master of disguise attempting to steal secrets all across the world. Bugoff is the Phantom character inSlick Sleuths, but now he is coloured pink. Radio & Television Packagers, Inc. were the producers of the film, which received a very limited theatrical release, primarily being shown on the16MM circuit.
In 2005, Inkwell Images released a DVD documentary entitledMutt and Jeff: the Original Animated Odd Couple; severalMutt and Jeff animated cartoons are included on the disc.[22] Also, individual Mutt and Jeff cartoons have been mixed with other titles on low-cost video collections, such as theCartoon Craze DVDs from Digiview Productions. CartoonsOnFilm has been working on a long-term goal of restoring all surviving Mutt and Jeff cartoons.
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