Mutt and Jeff — 1908-04-22

A horizontal strip of seven ink-drawn panels lampoons the ordeal of seating a jury, with caricatured prospective jurors—a pompous professor, a veteran, a scavenger-wagon driver, a pair of shifty conferees—each rejected or accepted on absurd grounds. Speech balloons carry clipped, colloquial dialogue; captions beneath each panel supply deadpan biographical detail. The banner headline above doubles as satirical punchline. Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff*, launched in the *San Francisco Chronicle* in 1907, was among the first strips built around recurring characters across daily installments—a structural leap that transformed newspaper comics from single-gag cartoons into serialized narrative, directly prefiguring the comic book format that would be born by anthology-reprinting such strips in the 1930s.