The Smith Family Comic Strip

Monday, June 29, 2026

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Over fifty years, the Smiths created more than 12,000 daily and Sunday comic strips, reaching millions of readers worldwide. One of the longest-running family humor strips of the 20th century.

George Smith, the Washington state artist who draws "The Smith Family," has seldom been one to keep his views to himself.

Several years ago his once popular strip plummeted from being carried in more than 70 newspapers to being featured in just under 25.

His distaste for the public school systems, his beliefs that modern society leads its members to acquire a destructive agression, one of his character's "Dirty Is Beautiful Society," and an argument against the automobile led to a big wave of cancellations in the late 1970s. It nearly forced the strip, which was started in 1950, to end itself.

Smith has now toned down his criticism, although it does occasionally slip through. And his strip is once again regaining its popularity.

"I'm not going to do that anymore," Smith said of his aggressive criticism two years ago in an interview with The Columbian. "I've been beating the air. You know we do have to eat occasionally.

Although family comic strips are very popular today, The Smith Family was an innovation when it was first picked up by The Boston Globe 33 years ago.

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Smith now lives with his wife, Virginia, near White Salmon, Washington. Several members of his large family (they had 11 children) live nearby.

A devout Catholic much of his life, Smith received his early education in the church school. He attended art schools early in his life under programs funded by Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration. In the late 30s, the took classes at Brooklyn's prestigious Pratt Institute.

He began selling one-panel cartoons as a teenager.

Sunday, June 28, 2026

1954

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

When the Tot Charged Admission: A 2007 Globe Feature Reconnects The Smith Family to the Stage.

In the spring of 2007, The Boston Globe ran a feature that, for our archive, sits at a perfect intersection — the comic strip that started it all, the newspaper that first published it, and a daughter who grew up inside the panels and went on to make a life in the theater.

The article, by Globe correspondent Terry Byrne, profiles Carol Triffle, daughter of The Smith Family creators George and Virginia Smith. It ran the day before her Portland-based Imago Theatre brought its revue FROGZ! to Boston's Cutler Majestic Theatre. And it opens, fittingly, with a comic strip.

A free show — for the price of a lemonade

Byrne begins with a 1964 Smith Family strip. A tiny blond tot invites her father to a show she's putting on. It won't cost a thing, she assures him — he just must buy a glass of lemonade. After the performance, she steps up to his chair and pipes: that'll be two dollars and fifty cents for the lemonade.

The tot was drawn from life. Carol Triffle was a regular character in her parents' strip, one of the eleven Smith children whose everyday adventures George and Virginia turned into a nationally syndicated feature. The strip originated in the Globe and ran, by this article's account, from 1951 to 1994 — more than four decades of finding fun in family life.

Humor learned at the drawing table

What makes the piece valuable to us isn't just the charming hook. It's the through-line Byrne draws between George Smith's art and his daughter's stagecraft.

Triffle, co-creator of FROGZ!, describes learning as a child how to combine simple ideas with high-impact imagery — exactly what her father did with minimal brush strokes. "Our show is simple like his drawings," she told the Globe, "but his strip had a much more philosophical bent." She watched him draw constantly, and the influence shows in how she builds her own work, even though, by her own account, she doesn't draw nearly as well as he did.

That household, by her tell, was its own kind of theater. With no television — her father didn't want one — the family of ten girls and one boy to entertain each other. "I think I learned more about listening to an audience response and adjusting what works and what doesn't from having that built-in crowd watching me show off," she said, laughing.

George Smith, at 87

The article also reaches George Smith himself, by phone at a daughter's home outside Seattle. At 87, he reflected on where the strip came from: the same instinct to find humor in everyday life. "So many things happen with children, the strip kind of writes itself," he said. He credited his wife, Virginia, who edited the strip's story lines — "I was just putting words to music” and he spoke warmly of the Globe as the first paper ever to pick up The Smith Family.

For an archive built around this strip, a 2007 interview with its creator is a rare and precious thing: a late, first-person account of how the work was made and what it meant to the man who made it.

Why this piece matters to the archive

Beyond its warmth, the feature does real documentary work. It independently confirms several cornerstones of the strip's history — its Globe origins, its long syndication run, its basis in the Smiths' large family, and Virginia's essential editorial hand. And it shows something the archive cares about deeply: that The Smith Family
didn't simply end in 1994. Its sensibility carried forward into a new generation and onto the live stage, where one of its original "characters" is still putting on a show.

Just, presumably, for more than two-fifty.

From the collection of The Smith Family Comic Archive Project. Article: "A comics perspective" / "From childhood on, she's played to a full house," by Terry Byrne, The Boston Globe, May 30, 2007 (pages E1 and E7). Carol Triffle portrait by Justine Hunt/Globe Staff; strip reproduction courtesy Globe Archives. The Smith Family strip © George and Virginia Smith.