Mutt and Jeff belongs to Cupples & Leon’s long-running series of book-format collections based on Bud Fisher’s enormously popular newspaper comic strip.

The volume brings together episodes featuring the contrasting personalities of Mutt and Jeff. Their friendship and frequent frustration with one another provides the foundation for a succession of comic situations involving everyday life, money, work, travel, social encounters, schemes, practical jokes, and misunderstandings.

Much of the humor depends on anticipation and reversal. Mutt or Jeff may begin with what appears to be a clever plan, only for circumstances or the other character to transform it into something entirely unexpected.

The result is a style of straightforward visual comedy that helped make the characters household names during the first decades of the twentieth century.