Smitty: He Said a Mouthful

This strip exemplifies the visual economy of newspaper comics: four panels, recurring characters (Herby and young Smitty), and a setup-payoff structure built on wordplay. A stockbroker brags about attending a luncheon; Smitty asks the logical question—what distinguishes lunch from luncheon?—and the punchline arrives in the final panel. The strip's tight layout and reliance on dialogue over action typify the daily newspaper page, where artists worked within rigid grids. Speech balloons, panel borders, and sequential narration were the visual grammar inherited from earlier comic strips and developed throughout the 1920s, establishing conventions that would define the medium for decades.