Smitty — Miscasting His Vote

A Sunday strip page following Smitty, a office boy character created by Walter Berndt. The narrative tracks Smitty's encounter with a political candidate and his subsequent vote. Rendered in the direct, linear style of early newspaper comics, the strip employs sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring supporting characters typical of the dailies and Sunday pages that established comic art's visual language. Smitty ran for decades in syndication, exemplifying how newspaper strips functioned as primary mass-market entertainment and how artists of this era developed the fundamental grammar—panel progression, dialogue integration, character consistency—that would form the basis of the comic book industry.