Bud Fisher, NBM

We are living in the golden age of comic strip reprints, which is good because the golden age of comic strips ended so long ago that there are few echoes of it still audible in our dull and shrinking funny papers. With complete serializations of Peanuts, Thimble Theatre, Krazy Kat, Dennis the Menace, Gasoline Alley, Dick Tracy, and, coming in September, Terry and the Pirates all in print, it’s easy to forget that not all comics of yesteryear are such gems that they deserve this archival treatment.

Mutt & Jeff exists on the fringes of the great comic strips, certainly of historical import, probably better than The Katzenjammer Kids, but not quite good enough to be known for being good. It’s probably for the best that the strip is not being reprinted in its entirety, as few people would want to slog through the early antics of A. Mutt, grounded as they are in the horse-racing results of 1907 San Francisco. Few would probably want to slog through the few years of the strip, even after it went national.

For Mutt & Jeff is a slapstick strip, and slapstick, to be funny at all, requires above all else precise timing. It is possible to manipulate time in comic form, but it’s certainly not easy to do with only six panels to work with, especially if you need five to set up the gag. NBM’s selection of early strips, which start two years into its run, is not without interest, if only for the all-but indecipherable slang that’s tossed around (“Class to me, eh, Mutt?” “There’s no use talking, Jeff, you can’t keep a squirrel on the ground”). But with the number of pratfalls Mutt takes in the final panels it’s not a promising beginning.

What’s amazing is how much better the strip gets, and how fast. Forever Nuts collects strips from 1909–1913, and comparing the art in the front of the book and the back reveals a great deal of progress. The stiff figure work or the early strips gives way to more fluid movement that isn’t quite E.C. Segar or Roy Crane, but at least people, you know, bend at the waist now. Even better is the inking, which becomes filled with crosshatchings and nervous bits of shading. The gags improve, too. Compare the strip reprinted on page 19 of this volume with the strip on page 59. The strips, with Mutt acting as a weak-willed umpire who progressively angers both teams with indecision, are almost identical, a particularly blatant case of self-plagiarism, with each panel of the later strip a nearly exact copy of the earlier,—until the last. The earlier strip ends with Mutt tossed through a fence as he mutters, “What’s the use?” (his catchphrase), a typical punchline in those days; in the latter the violence is all implied, and the last panel jumps to the hospital, where Jeff is trying unsuccessfully to bring his friend flowers. This is a much broader jump in what Scott McCloud would call “closure”; it’s also a much more severe beating; and none of it’s shown. The latter strip is, consequently, much funnier. Bud Fisher was learning fast.

Exactly how fast we don’t know, because, in one of this volume’s biggest flaws, none of the strips are dated. It would have been a simple matter to include a small number below each strip, and Jeffrey Lindenblatt’s failure to so is almost unforgivable. Also annoying is the fact that certain strips, such as the first one, or Jeff’s first appearance (in a madhouse no less), are left out, when these firsts are precisely the kind of curiosities that would make a reader brave the roughness of the earliest years.

I’m not sure how many volumes of Mutt & Jeff it will be necessary to release—Allan Holtz’s introduction to this inaugural volume concedes that the strip “ran far too long,” and I would be surprised if there exists anyone in the world eager to read the duo’s adventures from the ’seventies. But this volume, at least, despite its flaws, will reward checking out.

NBM has hinted that more classic reprint selections are on their way, and I’ve heard rumors of Happy Hooligan and Moon Mullins, but they’re being coy about confirming anything…