Smitty

A daily newspaper strip following the misadventures of Smitty, an office boy, and his street-smart friend Scrappy. The comic employs the visual conventions established in early strips: sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters in episodic gags. Here, Smitty devises a scheme to shift blame from himself to his boss—a setup typical of the strip's humor, which derived comedy from workplace dynamics and the scheming of working-class youth. The loose, energetic line work and visual staging reflect the drawing style of newspaper comics that directly influenced the emerging comic book medium of the 1930s and 1940s.