Smitty

A Sunday comic strip following office boy Smitty and his misadventures in the workplace and beyond. This panel sequence shows Smitty sneaking away for a swim while his boss is out, then attempting to show off his newfound swimming technique with water-wings—only to find himself surrounded by other children in the pool. The strip employs the visual vocabulary established by newspaper comics: rectangular panels arranged left-to-right, speech balloons carrying dialogue and thought, and recurring characters in episodic gags. *Smitty* exemplified the humor comic strips that dominated American newspapers during the comic strip's golden age, when dailies and Sunday pages functioned as the primary medium for sequential narrative art before the emergence of comic books.