Smitty

This office comedy strip follows Stanley, an office boy navigating the workplace hierarchy. The four-panel sequence demonstrates the visual economy of newspaper comics: recurring characters, direct dialogue, and physical comedy resolved within a single strip. A superior sends Stanley on an errand; Stanley misunderstands; the boss later discovers Stanley doing his work. The strip employs the panel-and-balloon language pioneered by early newspaper comics—a visual grammar that became foundational to the medium. Office settings and workplace mishaps provided reliable material for daily humor strips distributed nationwide, making *Smitty* part of the machinery that turned sequential comic art into mass entertainment and a training ground for the techniques that would define comic books.