Smitty — The Modern Touch

A four-panel Sunday strip featuring Smitty and his boss in typical office and leisure scenarios. The first panel establishes the setup indoors; subsequent panels shift to an outdoor setting where Smitty attempts to impress his boss by climbing a tree. The final panel delivers the punchline—Smitty trapped in the branches. The strip employs the visual conventions that became standard in newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, clear cause-and-effect narrative, and a joke structure dependent on visual comedy. Smitty exemplifies the daily and Sunday comic strips that formed the economic and artistic foundation of American comic books, establishing the medium's core grammar of panel layout, character consistency, and humor timing.