Smitty — Simple

In this four-panel strip, young Smitty attempts to convince his brother that a stray dog deserves dinner money rather than a dime for candy. The narrative unfolds through speech balloons and visual gags: Smitty's pitch, his brother's skepticism, the revelation of a "nith dog," and the punchline about beating rather than feeding the animal. The strip exemplifies the visual economy of newspaper comics—recurring child characters, simple line work, and sequential panels that advance a joke within tight space constraints. *Smitty*, which debuted in 1921, became a foundational daily strip distributed nationally, helping establish the formal grammar of comics: panel divisions, word balloons, and visual continuity that would shape the medium's development into the modern comic book.