Smitty

This newspaper strip follows Smitty, an office boy whose schemes and mishaps drive its humor. The Sunday page demonstrates the visual conventions that shaped comic strip language: multiple panels advancing a gag sequence, speech balloons carrying dialogue, and exaggerated character expressions. The strip's office-worker setting and recurring cast—Smitty and his boss—reflect the urban workplace humor popular in daily papers. Published across hundreds of newspapers, strips like this reached millions of readers and established the visual grammar later adopted by comic books: the panel grid, sequential narrative, and character consistency that became the foundation of the medium.