Smitty — Buried Treasure

This Sunday strip exemplifies the visual conventions that shaped modern comics: sequential panels with speech balloons advancing a continuous narrative, recurring characters in comic situations, and ink-line drawing style. The four-panel progression shows a boss and employee discussing a scheme involving native workers and buried treasure—a plot structure typical of newspaper adventure comics. By the 1920s, strips like *Smitty* appeared in hundreds of papers nationwide, establishing the template later adopted by comic books: character-driven humor, visual gags, dialogue-heavy storytelling, and exotic settings that appealed to mass audiences.