Mutt and Jeff — 1908-04-25

Six horizontal panels investigate 'The Cowardly Wrecking of Baby Jack's Cage,' treating a damaged birdcage as a full murder-mystery parody. Mutt — lanky, top-hatted, perpetually scheming — interviews a rotating cast of bystanders, each rendered in the loose ink-line shorthand that Bud Fisher had been refining since the strip's 1907 debut in the *San Francisco Chronicle*. Speech balloons spill dense, slangy dialogue; inset portraits and caption blocks alternate with action gags, demonstrating the flexible panel grammar Fisher helped standardize. *Mutt and Jeff* was among the first strips to run as a true daily continuity, a structural innovation that made comic-strip characters into recurring franchises and supplied the serialized blueprint that early comic-book anthologists would repackage wholesale a generation later.