Smitty—Monkey Shines

This strip follows Smitty, a recurring character navigating urban life through episodic gags. Here, a taxi driver's wish for trouble-free travel collides with a mischievous monkey that repeatedly extends its hand—a physical comedy beat repeated across panels for cumulative effect. The four-panel layout uses speech balloons and sequential action to build the joke. Newspaper strips like *Smitty* established visual conventions—recurring characters, panel flow, expressive linework—that became foundational to comic book storytelling. Artists working in the dailies and Sunday pages invented the grammar of the medium itself: how to pace narrative, convey emotion through gesture, and organize information spatially for maximum impact and readability.