Smitty — The Star Boarder

A domestic comedy strip following the misadventures of a boarding house resident. This four-panel sequence demonstrates the strip's reliance on visual gags and character interaction: a woman complains about her husband's behavior, another observes a boarder's attachment to his neck, and the final panels reveal his peculiar habit of hanging pasta around his collar at dinner—a joke playing on embarrassment and social awkwardness at the table. Smitty exemplifies the newspaper comic strip format that emerged in the early twentieth century, built on recurring characters, sequential panels with speech balloons, and humor derived from domestic situations. These strips appeared daily and weekly in newspapers nationwide, establishing the visual vocabulary and narrative structures that would define comic books.