Smitty — Lost and Found

Walter Berndt's *Smitty* follows a mischievous office boy through daily misadventures. Here, Smitty loses his employer's prized hunting dog in the countryside, then recovers it by accident—a classic setup-and-payoff structure that drove newspaper comic strip humor. The strip uses sequential panels with speech balloons and visual gags refined through years of dailies and Sunday pages. *Smitty* appeared in hundreds of newspapers during the 1920s–30s, exemplifying how strips like this one trained readers in visual narrative and became the direct ancestors of the comic book format that would emerge in the following decade.