Smitty — Hide and Seek

This *Smitty* strip demonstrates the visual conventions that shaped early American comics: bordered panels guiding narrative sequence, speech balloons carrying dialogue and thought, and a recurring character navigating comic situations. The strip follows a simple hide-and-seek premise—children searching for their friend—across four panels that shift from water to woods to mountain landscape. The economy of line and use of shadow and rain effects show how newspaper cartoonists developed efficient visual storytelling for daily publication. *Smitty*, which ran for decades in syndicated papers, exemplified the newspaper comic strip as a mass medium that established the grammar later adopted by comic books.