Smitty—A Cash Customer

This newspaper comic strip follows Smitty, a boy character navigating urban life with schemes and small adventures. The strip uses sequential panels with speech balloons to advance narrative and gag—visual devices that became foundational to comic storytelling. Smitty's recurring cast and episodic humor made the character a fixture of the daily funny pages, which served as training ground for the visual language later adopted by comic books. The strip's panel layouts, expressive linework, and reliance on character continuity exemplify how newspaper comics established the grammar of modern sequential art before the emergence of the comic book format itself.