Smitty: A Human Art Gallery

This strip from *Smitty*, a daily and Sunday comic that ran from 1922 to 1973, follows young Smitty and his friend as they visit an art gallery by the seaside. The dialogue moves from Smitty's enthusiasm about the ocean to his daydream of becoming a great sailor, a visual gag anchored in the comic's signature style: small rectangular panels with speech balloons, simple ink linework, and recurring child characters in contemporary settings. The strip exemplifies the newspaper comic format that preceded the comic book—serialized humor that built readership through character familiarity and wordplay, establishing the panel-based sequential narrative grammar that would define the medium.