Smitty: Banking Dogs Don't Bite

This strip from *Smitty* demonstrates the visual conventions that defined newspaper comics: multiple panels advancing a gag sequence, dialogue balloons anchoring character speech, and a recurring protagonist navigating urban comedy. The strip's humor turns on a child's misadventure and an adult's escalating worry—classic material for the daily funny pages. *Smitty* exemplified how newspaper comics functioned as serialized entertainment, with consistent characters and settings drawing readers back daily. The bold linework and clear panel progression show the technical vocabulary cartoonists developed to tell stories in miniature, vocabulary that would become foundational to comic books when they emerged as a distinct medium in the 1930s.