Smitty — The Retreat

This four-panel daily strip follows Smitty and an unnamed Indian boy fleeing pursuers through a forest. The action moves left to right across the page: the boy reports losing their trackers; Smitty realizes enemies approach from ahead; both characters react with alarm; Smitty urges retreat toward camp. The strip employs sequential panel layout with speech balloons, motion lines, and cross-hatched shading typical of 1920s newspaper comics. Recurring characters and episodic storytelling allowed dailies like *Smitty* to sustain reader interest across weeks of serialized narrative—a format that directly influenced the development of American comic books.