Smitty: Priceless

This four-panel strip follows a negotiation between a businessman and a young man named Smitty over shares of stock. The humor turns on competing valuations: Smitty seeks explanation of the shares' worth, the businessman emphasizes profit-sharing rights, and the strip concludes with an absurdist reversal—happiness itself declared the grandest stock and marked "preferred." The strip exemplifies newspaper comic conventions: recurring boy character, rapid dialogue advancing a single joke, and sequential panel layout. *Smitty* ran as both daily and Sunday installments, part of the syndicated format that established comics as a mass medium and influenced the visual vocabulary later adopted by comic books.