NBM is planning an April release for Forever Nuts: Classic Screwball Strips, The Early Years of Mutt & Jeff.  The deluxe, dust-jacketed 192-page, 8' x 6' hardcover will have a cover price of $24.95.  Cartoonist Bud Fisher, who created Mutt & Jeff in 1907-1908, was the first cartoonist to become rich and famous thanks to the enormous popularity of his newspaper comic, which was the first successful daily comic strip in U.S. history as it established the Monday through Saturday schedule still followed today.

Mutt and Jeff was also the first comic strip to tackle political topics when the pint-sized Jeff ran for president in 1908, and Mutt and Jeff was also the first comic strip to be adapted into a cartoon series (hundreds of Mutt and Jeff cartoons were made during the silent era).  Mutt and Jeff also launched an enormous amount of merchandise and was one of the first comic strips to appear in comic books (it was on the cover of Famous Funnies #1 in 1933).  The extent of its influence on American culture can be indicated by the fact that people still refer to the pairing of a tall man and a short guy as 'Mutt and Jeff.'

Comic strip expert Jeffrey Lindenblatt is editing NBM's Mutt and Jeff reprints and comics historian Allen Holtz is providing the introduction to the first volume, while J.P. Trostle is handling the design chores. 

With the recent announcement by Fantagraphics of the reprinting of Walt Kelly's Pogo, Drawn & Quarterly's  Gasoline Alley/Walt & Skeezix volumes, and IDW's Dick Tracy series it appears that this is quickly becoming a new golden age of comic strip reprints (see 'Comic Strip Collections Highlighted in New York Times').  NBM was a participant in the first golden age reprints back in the 1980s when it reprinted Milton Caniff's classic Terry and the Pirates in a series of superb hardcover volumes.