Smitty

A four-panel daily strip following office life and the relationship between Mr. Bailey, the boss, and Smitty, his young employee. The strip uses the visual conventions established by newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s: bordered panels, speech balloons, and a recurring cast in ongoing workplace situations. Smitty's humor derives from the contrast between Bailey's authority and Smitty's youthful irreverence, played out through dialogue and exaggerated facial expressions. The strip exemplifies how newspaper comics of this era developed a visual shorthand for character and situation that would directly influence the comic book form emerging in the mid-1930s.