Smitty — Dark Mystery

A newspaper comic strip episode featuring Smitty, a young office boy navigating adult schemes and mischief. The strip employs sequential panels with speech balloons to advance narrative across four scenes: a warning at the club, dinner party intrigue, a rendezvous in the smoking room, and a darkened finale. The style is characteristic of early American dailies and Sunday pages—simple line work, expressive characters, and visual gags that unfold through panel progression. Smitty strips appeared in newspapers nationwide and exemplified the comic strip format that directly preceded the comic book: recurring characters, serialized stories, and the visual grammar of panels and dialogue that became foundational to the medium.