Smitty—The Same From the Boss

A Sunday strip panel from *Smitty*, Walter Berndt's office-boy comedy that ran in newspapers from 1922 onward. The comic shows the boss and coworkers gathered to deliver New Year's wishes, while Smitty—the perpetually mischievous office boy—creates chaos in the background. Berndt's strip exemplified the visual innovations pioneered in newspaper comics: sequential panels, speech balloons, and a cast of recurring characters whose personalities drove episodic humor. *Smitty* became a staple of the funny pages, demonstrating how daily strips built reader loyalty through familiar situations and predictable character types, establishing conventions that would define comic books when they emerged as a distinct medium in the 1930s.