Smitty — Seeing Things!

This daily strip follows Smitty, a mischievous office boy, through four panels of rapid-fire gags. The first panel establishes the setup—Smitty interrupts his friend before school. By the second, his friend dismisses the news. The third panel shifts to Dr. Garbutt, a veterinarian showing X-ray images, while Smitty and the friend arrive for a viewing. The final panel reveals the joke: an X-ray of a striped animal, likely meant as visual humor about what they're "seeing." The strip exemplifies the newspaper comics tradition that birthed the modern comic book. Its panel layout, speech balloons, and recurring characters established visual storytelling conventions. Like many dailies of the era, *Smitty* built narrative momentum across panels and relied on both visual gags and dialogue—techniques that would define sequential art.