Smitty: Casting His Own Vote Out

A five-panel strip following young Smitty's ascent from office boy to plutocrat. The narrative moves left to right across shop-floor gossip, stock tips from the boss, and Smitty's sudden wealth—culminating in his revelation that he's now eligible to vote. The strip exemplifies the visual vocabulary newspapers standardized: bordered panels, speech balloons anchored to speakers, and recurring characters whose domestic and professional lives drove serial narratives. By the 1920s, such strips had become the primary laboratory for sequential art, establishing the formal and narrative conventions that would define the comic book medium.