Smitty — A Good Start!

This strip follows Smitty, an office boy navigating workplace schemes. The narrative unfolds across four panels: Smitty pitches a plan to sabotage a rival's job prospects, describes the scheme to his boss, celebrates success, then discovers the opponent earns more money. The gag relies on visual clarity and quick dialogue—speech balloons anchor character voices while sequential panels advance the plot. *Smitty* exemplifies the newspaper comic strip formula perfected in the 1920s: recurring characters, stable settings (the office), and humor rooted in relatable situations. The strip's visual economy—simple lines, expressive faces, clear panel borders—became the foundational grammar for commercial comics, establishing how readers decode meaning across frames.