Smitty — A 'Mess' of Trout

This Sunday strip showcases the visual conventions that shaped comic storytelling: multiple panels advancing a linear gag, speech balloons positioning dialogue, and recurring characters in familiar situations. Smitty, a mischievous boy, attempts to catch trout using unconventional methods—a stick and rock—before the strip pivots to a cooking punchline. The Sunday format allowed artists to expand their narratives across larger layouts with varied panel sizes and spatial arrangements. Such newspaper strips, running daily and weekly from the 1920s onward, established the grammar of sequential art that became foundational to the medium.