Smitty

This Sunday strip follows Smitty and the Boss exploring an abandoned gaming palace. The narrative unfolds across four panels: the pair discovers an old-time arcade, Smitty discusses the mechanical games he's encountered across America, he proposes betting on a roulette spin, and chaos erupts when the wheel malfunctions. The strip demonstrates the visual conventions that defined newspaper comics: sequential panel layout, speech balloons advancing plot and character voice, and recurring character types—the young everyman protagonist and his authority-figure foil. Published in newspapers nationwide, such strips were the direct ancestors of the modern comic book, establishing the visual grammar and serialized humor that would define the medium.