Smitty — Out of the Past

A six-panel daily strip in which Roger receives an urgent visit from Jim, who needs information about a 1933 plane accident involving passenger A.W. Smith. The strip exemplifies the newspaper comic's narrative economy: rapid scene changes, sequential dialogue balloons, and recurring characters advancing a plot across multiple panels. The artist uses bold black lines and cross-hatching typical of Depression-era dailies, where strips like *Smitty* appeared in hundreds of newspapers simultaneously. These strips—published six days a week, sometimes Sunday—trained readers in visual storytelling conventions: the left-to-right panel sequence, thought balloons, varied shot scales. By the 1930s, reprinted collections of newspaper strips had become proto-comic books, establishing the form that would dominate American popular culture.