Smitty — The Meeting Place

A four-panel gag strip featuring Smitty and his dog Dinky. The humor turns on mistaken identity and escalating chaos: a character mistakes a Dickens horse statue for a real mount, leading to a series of physical misadventures through a city street and into a building. The strip employs sequential visual storytelling with speech balloons, multiple characters in action, and slapstick timing spread across distinct panels. Smitty strips appeared in newspapers as both dailies and Sunday features, exemplifying the visual and narrative conventions that shaped early comic strip language—panel borders, dialogue placement, and recurring character dynamics that would become foundational to comic book form.