Smitty — Substantiation

This *Smitty* strip follows the recurring gag of a small boy mistaken for an adult. An older man complains that Smitty resembles a gruff fellow; the boy warns against assumptions. When Smitty crosses the street, the man mistakes him for that very stranger and attempts to warn him. The final panel subverts expectations—the actual man appears elsewhere. The strip exemplifies the visual vocabulary newspapers developed: sequential panels advancing narrative time, speech balloons anchoring dialogue, and a compact protagonist whose size creates comic misunderstanding. *Smitty*, launched in the 1920s, belonged to the daily newspaper strips that established the medium's grammar before comic books existed as a format.