Mutt and Jeff — Cicero Mutt Case

Six horizontal panels follow the courtroom chaos of the *Cicero Mutt Case*, with lanky, mustachioed Mutt and rotund Jeff navigating a jury-selection farce. Caricatured attorneys gesticulate wildly; a dismissed juror reacts with comic indignation; speech-heavy caption blocks and integrated word balloons crowd each drawing, characteristic of the strip's dense, newspaper-column format. Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* — launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907 — was among the first strips to run daily, pioneering the sequential recurring-character format that would anchor Sunday pages nationwide. Fisher's use of continuous narrative across strips, rather than self-contained gags, helped establish the structural conventions — panels, balloons, cliffhanger continuity — that Sunday broadsheet pages exported directly into the first comic book reprints of the 1930s.