Smitty — I Love a Parade!

This Sunday page from *Smitty* demonstrates the visual sophistication of newspaper comics at their peak. The strip's opening panels establish narrative urgency—a character needs to catch a train—before shifting to the full-width parade scene that dominates the right half of the page. The artist uses panel borders to control pacing, speech balloons to anchor dialogue, and tonal variation to distinguish foreground action from crowd background. *Smitty*, which ran as both daily and Sunday installments, exemplified how newspaper comics had evolved into a distinct medium with recurring characters, serialized plots, and sophisticated page layouts that anticipated modern comic book design.