Smitty — Down to the Sea in Ships

This daily strip follows Smitty, a mischievous office boy character created by Walter Berndt. The four-panel sequence uses the visual language that became standard in newspaper comics: clear panel progression, speech balloons conveying dialogue and reaction, and expressive line work to show movement and emotion. Here, Smitty finds himself stranded on a boat, moving from calm observation to escalating panic as passing ships fail to notice him. The strip's humor relies on physical comedy and character predicament—Smitty's desperate plea for a rope captures the escalating stakes typical of slapstick narrative. Syndicated widely from the 1920s onward, Smitty exemplified how newspaper strips developed as serialized, character-driven entertainment that trained readers to follow sequential visual storytelling.