Smitty

A daily strip following office boy Smitty through workplace mishaps and tropical misadventures. Here, stranded with a friend after bad news from a yacht, Smitty hatches an escape plan as the girl's father arrives. The strip employs sequential panel composition with dynamic figure work and conversational speech balloons to move the narrative forward. *Smitty*, which debuted in 1921, exemplified the humor comic tradition that dominated newspaper funny pages before superhero strips emerged. Created by Walter Berndt, it demonstrated how recurring characters and episodic gags could sustain reader interest across decades—a structural model fundamental to comic strip storytelling and early comic book anthology formats.