Smitty: Girl of the Stone Age

This comic strip follows the office antics of Smitty, a young secretary, as she navigates her boss's demands and workplace mishaps. The strip employs the visual conventions established by newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons advancing a narrative, recurring characters, and physical comedy as primary humor. The art style—bold inking, economical linework, expressive figure drawing—reflects the dailies and Sunday pages that became the training ground for cartooning technique. Newspaper strips like *Smitty* established the grammar of comics: panel transitions, timing through layout, character consistency across strips, and the marriage of words and pictures. These strips syndicated nationally, reaching millions of readers and directly influenced the emergence of comic books in the late 1930s, which reprinted newspaper material alongside new work.