Smitty: Breaking Relations

This *Smitty* strip follows the wordless visual logic of silent comedy translated to newsprint. A woman observes a young chimp and boy through a window; when she comments on their cuteness, the boy takes offense. The gag escalates through four panels: the boy demonstrates the chimp's prowess, the woman and boy clash, and finally the chimp breaks free, leading to frantic chase. The strip employs the vocabulary of newspaper comics—sequential panels, speech balloons, motion lines, and repeated character types—that became foundational to comic book design. *Smitty*, which ran from 1921 to 1973, used such domestic scenes and physical comedy to populate the Sunday funnies, establishing patterns of narrative pacing and visual shorthand that would define the medium.