A. Piker Clerk was a short-lived yet influential newspaper American comic strip created in 1903 by the cartoonist Clare Briggs. It was syndicated in William Randolph Hearst's Chicago American until June 7, 1904.

Characters and story

A horseracing-related comic strip seen daily on the sports pages, A. Piker Clerk gave readers a racehorse tip each day. The strip featured the exceedingly thin Mr. Clerk, a character with a gambling problem, who placed daily bets on a horse in the Chicago races each day. The following day Clerk's win or loss was posted, as described in Toonopedia by comics historian Don Markstein:

Influence

It soon inspired similar strips in other papers, notably A. Mutt, which began in 1907 in the San Francisco Chronicle and evolved into Mutt and Jeff. In Encyclopædia Britannica Blog, Robert McHenry wrote: Although the strip brought national fame to Briggs, it was cancelled in June 1904 because Hearst considered it to be vulgar, although some consider this an urban myth.