Smitty — Tipster

This four-panel strip follows Scrappy's scheme to evict the big dog from his house by exploiting a weakness for cookies. The comic employs the visual vocabulary pioneered in early newspaper strips: sequential panels advancing a narrative, speech balloons advancing dialogue and humor, and a recurring cast of animal characters in domestic situations. The slapstick premise and wordplay typify the humor of daily comics that appeared in American newspapers, where artists developed the formal language—panel borders, perspective shifts, visual gags timed across frames—that would become the foundation of the modern comic book format.