Smitty

This newspaper comic strip follows Smitty, a office boy navigating urban life and modern conveniences. The strip employs the visual syntax established by early comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, facial expressions that drive humor, and recurring characters in ongoing situations. Here, Smitty and a colleague discuss delivering baked goods by automobile—a gag anchored in the era's fascination with motorized transport. The strip's clean linework and economical draftsmanship are typical of the dailies and Sunday pages that formed the infrastructure of American comics before the comic book format emerged. These newspaper strips, syndicated nationally, trained readers in panel-to-panel narrative and established the visual language that comic books would inherit and amplify.