Smitty — Below the Belt

A daily newspaper comic strip featuring office boy Smitty and his schemes. Here, Smitty reports on an opponent's rule-breaking to his boss, then watches a boxing match with instructions to observe closely. The strip uses the visual grammar of sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters that defined early comic strips. Published in newspapers nationwide, such strips were the direct ancestors of the comic book format, establishing how readers parsed action across frames and learned to follow narrative through image and word together.