Smitty

This daily strip follows a young office boy navigating workplace chaos. The four-panel sequence captures Smitty caught between his boss's contradictory orders—first told not to touch documents, then ordered to file them away. The visual gag relies on physical comedy and tight panel progression, hallmarks of newspaper comic strips that emerged in the early twentieth century. Speech balloons convey rapid-fire dialogue while simple line drawings and bold blacks create clarity and movement. *Smitty*, which ran from 1916 onward, exemplified the visual storytelling techniques that transformed comics from crude amusements into a recognized narrative art form in American dailies.