Smitty

Smitty follows a mischievous office boy and his schemes, told across multiple panels with dynamic action sequences. The strip employs the visual conventions that define newspaper comics: sequential panels advancing narrative time, speech balloons carrying dialogue, and recurring characters in episodic plots. Here, Smitty's attempt to signal a traffic stop spirals into comic chaos—each panel logically flowing from the last through cause-and-effect. The artwork uses bold outlines and bright colors typical of Sunday newspaper comics, while the pacing and slapstick humor rely on visual storytelling as much as text. Strips like Smitty helped establish the formal language of comics that would directly influence the comic book industry.