Smitty — A Good Guess

In this daily strip, Smitty's boss Gollywog describes an ideal office space while the boy envisions Smitty working in a luxury setting. The final panel delivers the punchline: his stenographer would never believe it. The strip uses sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters—visual devices that newspaper comics pioneered in the 1920s-30s. *Smitty*, which debuted in 1921, followed the success of *The Katzenjammer Kids* and other strips that established comics as a distinct narrative medium. The strip's humor relies on office workplace dynamics and class contrast, topics that resonated with readers during the Depression era.