Smitty

This newspaper comic strip exemplifies the visual vocabulary that shaped American comics. The panel grid structure, speech balloons, and sequential narrative—showing a boy's mischief with a newspaper—became foundational to the medium. Recurring characters like Smitty populated the dailies and Sunday pages that served as laboratories for comic storytelling. Artists working in this era established conventions still used today: varied panel sizes to control pacing, expressive linework to convey action and emotion, and the interplay of image and text. Newspaper strips were the principal venue for comics before the comic book format emerged in the 1930s, making the daily and Sunday pages the true birthplace of the modern medium.