Smitty

Walter Berndt's *Smitty* follows a young office boy through daily mishaps and schemes. This strip exemplifies the visual conventions that shaped early comics: sequential panels advancing narrative time, speech balloons carrying dialogue, and recurring characters in continuous situations. The gag structure—Smitty's problem, his boss's discovery, the payoff—drives the horizontal comic strip format that dominated newspapers from the 1920s onward. Berndt's clean linework and economical drawing style made the strip readable at small sizes, essential for newspaper publication. *Smitty* ran from 1921 to 1973, establishing the office-comedy template that influenced generations of comic strips and later comic books.