Smitty — Farewell

A businessman sits at his desk in four sequential panels, each revealing a moment of emotional farewell. In the first, he confides to himself that tomorrow brings Mary's happiness—her recovery from hardship through her husband's rehabilitation. By the final panel, he can only manage "Good-by..." before trailing off. The strip employs the visual vocabulary of newspaper comics: rectangular panels, speech balloons, and close focus on a single character's interior state. *Smitty*, a dailies and Sunday feature about office life and urban characters, built its humor and pathos through recurring situations and emotional beats that readers followed across months of publication—the foundational format that shaped American comic strips and their evolution into collected comic books.