Smitty—Safe as Dynamite

A four-panel Sunday strip in which Smitty and his boss recount a narrow escape from an island trip. The boss worries they'll be seen wearing grass skirts; Smitty reassures him they slipped away unnoticed. Relief turns to alarm when they realize the yacht owner spotted them after all. The strip demonstrates the visual economy of early newspaper comics: recurring characters, speech balloons conveying plot and personality, sequential panels advancing a single gag. Smitty strips ran in dailies and Sunday pages starting 1920, establishing a template for workplace humor and character-driven comedy that influenced generations of comic strip and comic book artists.