Smitty — Bedtime Story

A four-panel daily strip following a child's scheme to extract gossip from a visiting adult. The first panel establishes the setup: Smitty plots to find out who the mysterious visitor is by eavesdropping. Subsequent panels show the boy positioning himself near the conversation, listening intently as the guest talks at length, then triumphantly reporting his findings to a sleeping figure. The final panel delivers the payoff as the child settles into bed, having achieved his goal. The strip exemplifies the narrative economy of newspaper comics—tight gag construction, clear character staging, and reliance on readers' familiarity with recurring protagonists. Visual storytelling through panel sequencing and speech balloons became the foundation of comic book language, developed through decades of daily and Sunday newspaper strips that preceded the medium's commercial codification.