The Early Years of Mutt & Jeff

The Early Years of Mutt and Jeff by Bud Fisher. Edited by Jeffrey Lindenblatt. NBM, 2007. 192p., $24.95.

A few years back, in an attempt to broaden my literary knowledge (which at the time was fairly limited to the twentieth century), I read my way through a selection of titles from Harold Bloom’s Western Canon. I didn’t read everything, but I tried to hit the highlights, mostly in the history of the novel. Even in the accepted “classics,” I had wildly varying feelings about the books, from an enduring love of Tristram Shandy and Jacques the Fatalist to a respectful lack of interest in Richardson and Fielding. Comics have a much less extensive canon and by their early production circumstances (cheap and disposable) are much less easy to explore. I’ve been exploring comics history as much as I can over the past couple years, mostly picking up reprints as they become available. It is inevitable that I will find the comics Richardson and Fielding of respectful boredom to the Tristram Shandy love of works like Krazy Kat or Tintin.

NBM has produced a very nice volume of Mutt and Jeff strips from 1909-1913. The introduction by Allan Holtz calls it “the first successful daily comic strip, a model for all that would follow.” Those are strong historical credentials. Bud Fisher, the creator, was also the first celebrity cartoonist and first millionaire cartoonist. Alas, despite its historical importance, I found the reading of this volume more chore than pleasure. Mostly this has to do with the old fashioned and extremely repetitive humor. A majority of the strips seem to end with someone bonking someone else on the head. Sure, Krazy Kat goes that route too, but what makes Herriman’s strip so brilliant is the way he deals with that primal comic scene through the characters, language, visuals, and emotion. Fisher is much more conventional and it’s hard to get past the feeling of “I’ve seen this before” that permeates this collection.

Fisher’s art has a certain scratchiness to it but in a controlled way. The drawings feel very calm until they erupt into a flurry of movement and emanata. Fisher makes great use of speed lines, sweat drops, stars, and especially the dotted eye line to show a character’s gaze (hardly a strip goes by without someone’s gaze being directed at some thing). He keeps backgrounds to a minimal, using them as necessary, details when needed, but comfortable with a single line to designate the place where floor meets wall or sidewalk meets building.

Thin panels predominate in the strips, usually six or seven. These do well for the oft-repeated composition of two characters standing facing each other. They also allow for a greater number of beats than the now classic three or four panel gag, a little more time for set-up dialogue, a little more time for physical action.

The strips’ gags/narratives focus on Mutt. an inveterate gambler, and Jeff, his kind of friend, in their attempts to get wealth, status, food, or just escape their wives. Mutt is much more the protagonist with Jeff acting as the object of jokes or violence and, occasionally, the purveyor of such in getting back at his friend. There is the occasional spot of continuity in this volume, involving a trip to Europe and Mutt’s marriage/divorce, but for the most part there is little that alters in the world from one strip to the next. Each new strip is a clean slate.

In the end, I have a respect for the historical place of Mutt and Jeff, but reading so many of these strips at once left me bored with the repetition in a way that does not occur with similarly repetitive strips like Peanuts. Mutt and Jeff shows it’s age and suffers for it. Without the innovation seen in similarly aged strips from the likes of McCay or Herriman, Fisher’s work fails to feel relevant and fun to this contemporary reader.

NBM has done a great job reproducing these nearly century old strips. For the majority of the strips Fisher’s fine hatching is clear, blacks are rich, and the small text is quite readable. A smaller number are less crisp but still readable. At two strips per oblong page, they are at a decent size. My only real complaint about the production is the lack of dates on the strips and the lack of any clear organization to the order of the strips. This lack has been explained by the historical situation of the original publication, where the same strip appeared in different papers on different days, thus confound the archivist/editors abilities to order the strips with any authority. It still makes for a confusing matter when there is continuity, and on at least three separate occasions a strip is reproduced twice in the book, no doubt a result of this lack of organization.

This is the first book in NBM’s new “Forever Nuts: Classic Screwball Strips” series, where each volume will showcase a different classic comic strip. While I’ve found myself to not be a fan of Mutt and Jeff, I will keep my eye on future volumes in this reprint series.

Tags: comics-history, comic_strips, repetition

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