Smitty — Under Cover Man

This daily strip follows Smitty, a young office boy whose misadventures drive comic narrative forward. The four-panel sequence shows rapid scene changes: Smitty asks a favor indoors, encounters a woman outside, watches his neighbor approach in the background, and scrambles to hide his identity. The strip employs fundamental visual techniques—sequential panels, speech balloons anchoring dialogue, body language conveying emotion—that define newspaper comic language. Recurring characters and workplace settings anchor reader investment across installments. Smitty exemplifies the daily newspaper strip format that dominated early twentieth-century comics, establishing visual and narrative conventions that shaped the medium's grammar before comic books became a distinct format.