Harry Conway "Bud" Fisher (April 3, 1885 – September 7, 1954) was an American cartoonist who created Mutt and Jeff, the first successful daily comic strip in the United States.

[1] After a short-lived attempt at prizefighting, he began painting comic signs for window displays before becoming a layout person in the production department of the San Francisco Chronicle, where he soon became a cartoonist.

The concept of a newspaper strip featuring recurring characters in multiple panels on a six-day-a-week schedule actually had been created by Clare Briggs with A. Piker Clerk four years earlier, but that short-lived effort did not inspire further comics in a comic-strip format.

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.

[3]Mutt and Jeff gained such popularity that Fisher, who was able to claim copyright to the characters, received an offer to produce it for the San Francisco Examiner, owned by William Randolph Hearst.

They made 36 Mutt and Jeff short comedies in 1913, but production ceased for two years when Fisher's copyright was challenged.

When Fisher died in 1954, Smith began signing his own name and continued to draw the strip until 1980 when George Breisacher took over for its final two years.