Smitty — A Perfect Alibi

This newspaper strip follows young Smitty and his friend Jinxies through a domestic scene in which Smitty recounts a dream to his mother. The strip demonstrates the visual conventions that became standard in comics: sequential panels advancing a narrative, speech balloons containing dialogue and thought, and recurring characters in episodic situations. Smitty ran as both a daily and Sunday feature in American newspapers, reaching millions of readers. The strip's simple, readable linework and clear panel-to-panel progression exemplify how newspaper comics established the visual grammar—panel borders, word balloons, expressive figures—that would define the medium when comic books emerged as a distinct format in the 1930s.