Smitty — "A Slippery Trick"

This *Smitty* strip follows a classic setup: a small dog jealous of a larger rival plots revenge by destroying the big dog's master's house slippers, then frames him for the damage. The four-panel structure uses sequential art conventions—dialogue balloons, panel borders, and visual continuity—that became standard in newspaper comics and early comic books. *Smitty*, which debuted in the 1920s, exemplified the daily strip format that trained readers in visual narrative. The humor turns on slapstick and animal mischief, popular fare in the era when newspaper funny pages were the primary mass medium for sequential storytelling before comic books emerged as a distinct format in the 1930s.