Mutt and Jeff — 1908-09-11

Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* launched in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1907 as a daily strip — among the first comic strips built around a single recurring cast published continuously in sequence. This Sunday-page episode runs Mutt through jury duty: summoned by subpoena, he talks his way past a policeman, surveys the jury box with theatrical contempt ('as fine a looking jury as ever cracked a safe'), then bolts when he realizes it's 2:10 and the first race goes off at 2:30. The entire jury stampedes with him, bankroll in hand. Fisher's confident panel compositions, expressive crowd caricatures, and clock-driven physical comedy show a strip artist fully in command of sequential visual storytelling — the same grammar that would migrate, panel by panel, into the comic book format two decades later.