Smitty — As You Were

This four-panel strip follows a young office boy's misadventures when his father catches a cold. The sequence moves from Smitty's cheerful confession about smoking cigars for comfort, through a doctor's house call, to his mother's outrage at the habit, and finally to physical comeuppance. The strip employs the visual vocabulary that newspapers perfected: sequential panels advancing a gag, speech balloons for character voice, and a recurring cast of supporting players. *Smitty* was among the daily and Sunday strips that trained American readers to follow narrative through drawings—the foundational grammar that comic books would inherit and systematize into their modern form.