Smitty

This strip follows a young office boy navigating the adult world of business and finance. Here, an older mentor explains stock ownership to Smitty using simple visual teaching—a hallmark of newspaper comics' pedagogical role. The strip's panel structure, speech balloons, and recurring characters established in daily and Sunday pages became the visual vocabulary for modern comics. Artist Walter Berndt's *Smitty* exemplified how comics could render domestic and workplace humor through sequential art, influencing the grammar of panel transitions and character reaction that would define the medium.