Smitty—Figures in the Night

A four-panel strip following young office boy Smitty through a nighttime encounter. The narrative unfolds with economical clarity: Smitty's boss questions his commitment to a task; delivery trucks arrive with orders; Smitty awaits instructions in the darkness; figures approach. Artist Walter Berndt employs the visual grammar established by early newspaper comics—distinct panels, speech balloons anchoring character voice, sequential pacing that builds tension through arrangement rather than action. *Smitty* ran as a daily and Sunday strip from 1921 onward, exemplifying how newspapers became the incubator for comic art before the comic book medium existed. Berndt's clean linework and economical figure drawing became standard vocabulary for the medium.