Smitty — Applesauce

A four-panel gag strip featuring Smitty, a mischievous boy character, and an adult authority figure. The humor turns on a riddle: the difference between an apple and an elephant—a setup that allows the boy to outwit his elder with wordplay. The strip employs the visual conventions that became standard in newspaper comics: sequential panels advancing the joke, speech balloons for dialogue, and a recurring protagonist. *Smitty* ran as both a daily and Sunday feature, exemplifying the newspaper comic strip's golden age, when such strips drove circulation and established the visual and narrative grammar later adopted by comic books.