Smitty — The Last Laugh

A four-panel gag strip in which two characters recall a humorous misadventure in an old ghost town. The first character describes how frightened they were when a door slammed and they mistook the other for a specter; the second character interrupts with "Me? Touch nothing!" — the punchline revealing he was equally terrified. The strip demonstrates the visual economy of newspaper comics: expressive caricature, clear panel progression, overlapping dialogue balloons, and an isolated joke structure typical of dailies and Sunday pages from the 1930s. Such strips formed the foundation of comic-book narrative technique, establishing how sequential panels, speech, and gesture convey humor and character interaction.