Smitty — The Bump's Rush

A rapid-fire gag strip typical of the newspaper Sunday pages. A young office worker named Smitty navigates corporate scheming: two rival shareholders offer him stock to swing a business vote, but when he brings the scheme to his boss, the plan backfires spectacularly. The strip's visual economy—small panels stacked for quick pace, speech balloons overlapping action, character expressions driving the humor—reflects the newspaper comic's invented language. By the 1920s, strips like this appeared across American dailies and Sundays, establishing panel layout, word-and-image timing, and recurring characters as foundational to sequential art. The comic page became the training ground for the visual storytelling that would define comic books.