Smitty — Sign of the Times

This Sunday page from *Smitty* shows the strip's characteristic humor: two homeless men debate survival in the Depression, moving through four panels of escalating comic desperation. The layout exemplifies newspaper comic conventions—sequential panels with speech balloons advancing a gag, recurring characters in a fixed world. *Smitty*, which ran from 1921 onward, belonged to the syndicated dailies and Sundays that formed the commercial foundation of American comics. The strip's economical linework and panel-to-panel storytelling demonstrate how newspaper comics developed the visual grammar that comic books would inherit: the speech balloon, the multipanel sequence, and character consistency across installments. These newspaper strips were the primary venue for comics before the pulp magazines and comic books emerged in the 1930s.