A. Piker Clerk was a short-lived yet influential newspaper comic strip

Comic strip

A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

 created in 1903 by the cartoonist

Cartoonist

A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...

 Clare Briggs

Clare Briggs

Clare A. Briggs was an early American comic strip artist who rose to fame in 1904 with his strip A. Piker Clerk. Briggs was best known for his later comic strips "When a Feller Needs a Friend," "Ain't It a Grand and Glorious Feeling?" and "The Days of Real Sport".-Early life:Born in Reedsburg,...

. It was syndicated

Print syndication

Print syndication distributes news articles, columns, comic strips and other features to newspapers, magazines and websites. They offer reprint rights and grant permissions to other parties for republishing content of which they own/represent copyrights....

 in William Randolph Hearst

William Randolph Hearst

William Randolph Hearst was an American business magnate and leading newspaper publisher. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887, after taking control of The San Francisco Examiner from his father...

's Chicago American for a short period.

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 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 Don Markstein:

Mr. Clerk's claim to vulgarity was his gambling habit. Each day — his strip was probably the first reliable daily — he'd bet on a horse in a Chicago race. Next day, the race run, the strip would open with him having won or lost, depending on how the real-life horse did, then it was on to the next bet. The character and his gimmick were created by cartoonist Clare Briggs, who is much better known for a later creation, the domestic comedy Mr. & Mrs. Briggs did it at the behest of editor Moses Koenigsberg, who thought a racing-related comic, running in the sports pages, would appeal to adult readers of the daily papers. Many sources give 1904 as the year A. Piker Clerk began, but the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art has a couple of strips from December, 1903 in its collection.

Influence

It soon inspired similar strips in other papers, notably A. Mutt, which began in 1907 in the San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco Chronicle

thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...

and evolved into Mutt and Jeff

Mutt and Jeff

Mutt and Jeff was a long-popular American newspaper comic strip created by cartoonist Bud Fisher in 1907 about "two mismatched tinhorns." It is commonly regarded as the first daily comic strip. The concept of a newspaper strip featuring recurring characters in multiple panels on a six-day-a-week...

. In Encyclopædia Britannica Blog, Robert McHenry wrote:

Mutt & Jeff wasn't the first newspaper comic strip, but it was the first to achieve great success. It had been predated by three years by Clare Briggs’ A. Piker Clerk, a series that was also closely tied to the sport of kings but that died after a short run. An odd circumstance that caught my attention a great many years ago is the remarkable number of early comic-strip cartoonists who were from the Wisconsin-Illinois-Indiana region. Fisher was born in Chicago, Briggs in Reedsville, Wisconsin

Reedsville, Wisconsin

Reedsville is a village in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, United States. The population was 1,187 at the 2000 census.-History:The village was named after Judge George Reed, who, with his partner, Jacob Lueps, bought a section of land in the town of Maple Grove, Wisconsin. In 1854, they had the land...

.

Although the strip brought national fame to Briggs, it was cancelled in June 1904 because Hearst considered it to be vulgar.