Mutt and Jeff

Harry Conway Fisher, who drew the world-famous 'Mutt and Jeff' strip as "Bud" Fisher, was born in Chicago. In 1905, he left the University of Chicago in his third year to take a job as a triple-treat cartoonist (theatre, sports and general news) at the San Francisco Chronicle. He persuaded the sports editor to let him draw a page-wide daily comic strip, in imitation of Clare Briggs' 'A. Piker Clerk', called 'A. Mutt', dealing with a chronic horseplayer's wins and losses. In June 1908, 'Mutt and Jeff' moved to William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner, where it was syndicated by King Features and became a national hit. A Sunday page was added around the time the strip got its permanent title, 'Mutt and Jeff'. After a dispute with Heast in 1913, Bud Fisher wanted greener pastures, and took the strip to the Wheeler Syndicate in 1915, where he received 1,000 dollars a week for six strips. By 1921, he was well on his way to making a top salary of 4,600 dollars a week. By this time, he grew more and more interested in racehorses, and less interested in the daily mechanics of drawing Mutt and Jeff. He had been working with ghost artists since his days with Hearst. Among the artists that worked for Fisher were Billy Liverpool, Ed Mack, Ken Kling, George Herriman and Maurice Sendak. It was eventually Al Smith who did most of the artwork. Text (c) Lambiek