Smitty—An Undercover Man

This daily strip follows Smitty, an office boy navigating workplace mishaps and authority figures. The four-panel sequence demonstrates the visual economy of newspaper comics: recurring characters, speech balloons anchoring narrative, and sequential panels advancing a simple gag—here, Smitty's tardiness and his boss's discovery of a lucky child visitor. The strip exemplifies the formal language developed by newspaper cartoonists in the 1920s: panel borders frame action, dialogue clarifies visual storytelling, and character types recur across installments. Such strips populated the daily pages and Sunday funnies that preceded the comic book, establishing the visual grammar and production methods that would define the medium.