Smitty — The Under Cover Man

A daily newspaper comic strip following Smitty, an office boy caught in absurd workplace schemes. This panel sequence shows workmen covering desks with paint while staff hide Smitty to prevent discovery. The strip uses the visual vocabulary developed by newspaper comics: sequential panels advancing a gag, speech balloons carrying dialogue and thought, and recurring characters in episodic scenarios. Smitty exemplifies how newspaper comics of this era trained readers in panel-to-panel narrative flow—a grammar that would transfer directly to comic books when they emerged as a medium in the 1930s. Newspaper strips like this were the true birthplace of American comic-book art.