Smitty — Proof of the Pudding

A Sunday newspaper strip follows office boy Smitty as his boss schemes to keep him thin by cutting his meals short. When Smitty's dinner proves too delicious to resist, he sneaks extra dumplings, prompting the boss to taste the cooking himself—only to find his wife's culinary skills have won him over entirely. The strip employs the visual vocabulary now standard to comics: sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters in everyday situations. Smitty was among the most popular strips of its era, running across hundreds of newspapers and establishing the comic strip as a major form of humor and entertainment that would directly influence the emergence of the comic book industry.