Smitty — Fed Up

A six-panel Sunday strip featuring Smitty and George discussing mechanical birds that sing by pressing a button. George marvels at the artificial nature of the garden—trees, flowers, grass all made of paper—while Smitty's pet bird enjoys eating the paper decorations. The strip uses recurring characters, sequential panel layout, and speech balloons to advance its visual narrative. Created during the newspaper comic's golden age, such strips were the primary format for comic storytelling before the comic book industry emerged. The Sunday page combined humor with modest domestic scenarios, establishing the formal vocabulary—dialogue balloons, panel borders, expressive linework—that would define comics as a medium.