Smitty — Who Nose?

A four-panel gag strip featuring Smitty, a recurring character in newspaper comics. The narrative moves from a father explaining a tropical vacation to his son, through an evening on the beach, to the punchline: the boy has gotten into something messy. The strip demonstrates the essential grammar of newspaper comics—sequential panels, speech balloons, and character-driven humor—that shaped the medium's visual language. Smitty strips appeared regularly in newspapers throughout the 1930s and 1940s, contributing to the daily comic page format that preceded and influenced the comic book industry.