Smitty — Paying His Respects

A five-panel daily strip following Smitty, a young office boy, as he encounters his boss Mr. King and learns of an upcoming marriage. The strip employs the formal visual conventions of early newspaper comics: rectangular panels in sequence, dialogue balloons anchoring character speech, and a tight continuity of action and joke across frames. Smitty was a flagship property of the newspaper comic strip era, appearing in dailies and Sunday pages from 1920 onward. Created by Walter Berndt, the strip exemplified how recurring characters and workplace settings became the template for modern sequential art—establishing the visual grammar and narrative rhythm that would define the medium for decades.