Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,771

This is the grave of Bud Fisher.

Born in 1885 in Chicago, Harry Fisher was a rich kid, son of a prosperous merchant. He got to go to the University of Chicago but Bud, as he was known, was a kind of wild kid. He didn’t want to be a merchant. He tried to be a boxer for awhile, but that didn’t go so well or maybe his father intervened here, not sure. But he just got a regular job as a sign painter. By this time, he was in San Francisco. Someone noticed he was pretty good at graphics and the San Francisco Chronicle hired him as a layout guy for the newspaper. Pretty soon, he started drawing his own cartoons for the paper.

In 1907, he introduced a character called A. Mutt. Soon this became Mutt and Jeff, one of the most famous comics in the history of the genre. At the moment of its introduction, it was a sports cartoon, which is where most of Fisher’s early drawings appeared. He was an ambitious kid and has pushed his editor for two years to have a cartoon. The editor had said no because it would take up too much room, but Fisher was a rich kid and didn’t really take no for an answer.

As Fisher got Mutt and Jeff in the papers, it revolutionized the American comic. Before him, most comics were just a single panel. Fisher created the comic strip, in a series of panels. Part of the reason his editor had resisted his ideas is that everyone was used to reading vertically, not horizontally across an entire page. But Fisher quickly showed that reading a cartoon across a page was not something that would intimidate readers. Now, Fisher didn’t exactly invent the idea. A guy named Clare Briggs had created one in 1903 for The Chicago American, but it was cancelled very quickly. So Fisher had the first one that really mattered. Another way Fisher revolutionized the American comic was by copyrighting his own work, which let’s just say made him a lot of money over the decades.

Mutt and Jeff was crazy popular and anything that popular was going to get the attention of William Randolph Hearst. The tycoon soon came calling and Fisher moved to the San Francisco Chronicle. That also led to the syndication of the comic in Hearst papers across the country. Fisher also was excited to turn the characters into movies. This was the era of the short film and some animated comic action was perfect for the 12-15 minute one-reelers that dominated the film experience. There ended up being 36 Mutt and Jeff comedies, but the production rights were all screwed up. He had sold the rights to some New Jersey based company in 1911 but by 1913 figured he could create them himself and make more money. That led to lawsuits and all of that and in the end killed the series for a few years. But once he got the copyrights back, he went nuts. Between 1916 and 1927, there were a ridiculous 277 Mutt and Jeff films. I have never seen any of these and don’t know how many exist. He didn’t actually do most of the animation for these, but he took credit for it. Seems….not surprising.

Mutt and Jeff was also important in the early comic book world. All of this made Fisher very wealthy. He started farming out a lot of the work, particularly to a guy named Al Smith, who was definitely not the Democratic candidate for president in 1928. Smith basically ran the strip from 1932 to the end of Fisher’s life and well beyond. Fisher didn’t care anymore. In fact, he probably had ghost artists drawing it well before. He had his own animation studio and his employees recalled him being totally checked out. One artist said the only time he came by was when he was dating a new chorus girl and wanted to show off to her. In fact, the studio went bankrupt in 1921 due to his extravagant lifestyle, but he seems to have put it back together pretty quickly because he retained his personal wealth at the very least.

Since Fisher was so wealthy now, he did rich guy stuff. He married a vaudeville performer in 1912 and they eventually divorced. In 1925, he remarried, a woman who was the ex-wife of some obscure European count. They separated after four weeks but he never bothered getting the divorce, so she got actual ownership of Mutt and Jeff after his death. But other than that, he liked the ponies. He invested big time in thoroughbreds and with some success. His horse Nellie Morse won the Preakness in 1924, only the 4th filly to do so. He had another horse named Mr. Mutt that finished second in the Belmont Stakes that same year.

Fisher was a big influence on Walt Disney. To a certain extent that included the art, but what Disney really learned from Fisher was the single artist controlling the entire process. That was something Disney held onto very deeply, losing his mind, and much of his artistic vision, when his workers unionized in the early 40s. I don’t think Fisher ever really dealt with a union issue.

One thing Fisher had in common with a lot of the terrible contemporary comic strips that still exist in today’s syndicate is a complete lack of shame about ending Mutt and Jeff. See, Fisher died in 1954, of cancer. He was 69 years old. But he had already passed off the strip to Al Smith years ago. Smith kept it going until 1980. Then it went to George Breisacher for two more years until it finally underwent a mercy killing in 1982. I would say that I don’t know who even reads the endless continuation of Hagar the Horrible and B.C., and (puke) The Family Circus today, but I do know the answer and it is my dad. I wonder if these comics will have any future at all once the generation who has read them for over a half-century passes from the scene. I highly doubt anyone is reading Family Circus online, except (again in the case of my dad) someone who has finally stopped getting the dwindling two page sheet that was his local paper and gets the online version delivered to his e-mail every day instead. Anyway…

Bud Fisher is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other comic strip artists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Bil Keane is in Phoenix and I so want to visit it so I can assault The Family Circus. Speaking of awful cartoons, Marmaduke creator Brad Anderson is in Portland, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.