Smitty—War Dance

This strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary that newspaper comics pioneered: bordered panels guiding eye movement, speech balloons anchored to characters, and recurring protagonists in episodic scenarios. The four-panel structure tracks a gag from setup through punchline—a chief's tribal dance intended to help a stock market listener, which instead causes the man to flee in alarm at the spectacle. The strip's economy of line and clarity of action made such sequences reproducible daily in newspapers nationwide, establishing the grammar that comic books would later adopt as their foundation.