Background
He was born in Chicago, the son of Albert A. and Nellie G. Morse Fisher.
He was born in Chicago, the son of Albert A. and Nellie G. Morse Fisher.
He graduated from Hyde Park High School in Chicago and attended the University of Chicago for three months.
Fisher's first job was as a layout man and sports cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle, where his daily cartoon strip on the adventures of a racetrack hanger-on known as Augustus or A. Mutt first appeared on November 15, 1907.
Although Clare Briggs anticipated him with a daily strip in 1904 in the Chicago American, Fisher's cartoon remains the oldest daily strip still in existence. After a month Fisher took his strip to the rival San Francisco Examiner, a Hearst paper.
There he continued his daily strip featuring Mutt in order to burlesque the prominent figures in the investigations of graft that had begun during the reconstruction years following the 1906 fire and earthquake.
At first Mutt was alone. One by one Fisher added Joe Spiria and Sir Sid (who managed to survive) and eventually a diminutive character called Jeff, drawn to resemble an inmate of an insane asylum who thought he was James J. Jeffries, at that time world heavyweight boxing champion.
In his first cartoon appearance Jeff was beaten by Mutt, and this continued to be his usual fate. The strip was renamed "Mutt and Jeff, " and the pair battled their way through all the situations Fisher could think up. In time Mutt acquired a wife and a precocious child, Cicero, who has always remained the same age.
In 1909 Hearst sent Fisher to New York where the strip began to attract worldwide attention. In 1915, when his contract ended, Fisher joined the Wheeler Syndicate with a contract calling for six weekly strips at $1, 000 a week, and a few years later Mutt and Jeff began to appear in the Sunday comic sheets also.
In 1916 Fisher won a landmark copyright suit with the Hearst interests when the New York Supreme Court agreed that he, not Hearst, owned the right to the title "Mutt and Jeff. " (Fisher had had the foresight to copyright the names and the cartoons when he first invented them. ) Thereafter Mutt and Jeff remained a fixture in the World from 1915 until Scripps-Howard absorbed the Pulitzer interests in February 1931.
In 1921 the Bell Syndicate took over the distribution of the strip, and a few years later Fisher formed his own corporation for handling distribution and syndication. Fisher was always an ardent sports fan, especially of boxing, baseball, football, and horse racing. His own string of racehorses at one time consisted of more than fifty thoroughbreds.
His filly Nellie Morse--named for his mother--won the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico in 1924, and among his other great horses were Sporting Blood, Cartoonist, and Mr. Mutt. Fisher was twice married.
At the height of his fame, during the 1920's, Fisher was making $4, 600 a week from his syndicated strip and was also making frequent vaudeville appearances, annotating cartoon films, and appearing in stage shows.
He was the author of five books of Mutt and Jeff cartoons, which appeared from 1910 through 1916. Fisher was one of a small group of brilliant American cartoonists that includes Clare Briggs, Rube Goldberg, F. B. Opper, R. F. Outcault, George McManus, Jr. , Winsor McCay, George Herriman, J. R. Williams, and Tad (Thomas A. Dorgan).
Their work is classic in a genre in illustration that has now all but disappeared. Almost all of them grew up in newspaper offices and seem to have received little formal education.
His first wife was Pauline Watch, an actress. They married in 1912, and she divorced him in 1917.
In 1924 he married Aedita Stuart, divorced wife of the Count de Beaumont. This marriage ended in legal separation in 1927.