Smitty: Birds of a Feather

This strip exemplifies the visual conventions that shaped American comics: rectangular panels arranged left-to-right, speech balloons anchored to speakers, and a recurring protagonist navigating office scenarios. Smitty, a office boy, appears here scheming with colleagues to manipulate a shareholder—the strip's humor built on workplace intrigue and character interaction. The dense inking and caricatured faces typical of newspaper comic pages demonstrate how dailies and Sunday strips served as the primary laboratory for sequential art before comic books emerged as a distinct medium. Smitty's format—brief, episodic gags anchored by a familiar cast—became the template for the modern comic.