Smitty

This Sunday strip follows Smitty, a mischievous office boy, through physical comedy and urban adventure. The four-panel sequence demonstrates the newspaper comic's visual vocabulary: sequential action across panels, dialogue balloons anchoring speech, and expressive figure work that carries the gag. Smitty was among the most widely syndicated strips of the late 1920s, appearing in hundreds of papers. Created during the transition from single-panel gags to serialized narratives, strips like this established the grammar that would define the comic book medium—panel borders directing eye movement, character continuity across frames, and the marriage of word and image to tell a complete story in a confined space.