Mutt and Jeff — Jury Selection Comic Strip

This single-tier newspaper strip presents a jury-selection farce for "Cicero Mutt's Trial," parading a lineup of caricatured prospective jurors — Oscar Frankfurter, Olaf Digestbroads, Spaghetti Contesti, Armand Limpwinder, Personal Blushead, and Lenora Tasselface — each dismissed for comically disqualifying prejudices. Captions beneath each figure carry the gag load in the manner of early illustrated humor before speech balloons fully dominated. Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff*, launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, was among the first strips built around recurring characters in continuous daily narrative — a structural leap that distinguished the comic strip from its single-panel predecessors and laid direct groundwork for the comic book format that would emerge by the 1930s. Fisher's confident ink line and rapid character typing became a commercial template the industry followed for decades.