By embedding Fromm’s socio-analysis inside a lighthearted daily newspaper format, George Smith achieved something rare in twentieth-century media: he used commercial space to critique the economic system funding it.

His retreat to the remote woods of White Salmon, Washington, was the logical conclusion of the art — a refusal to participate in the “sane society” Fromm had exposed as deeply sick. The family’s home sat in the wooded foothills of the Cascades, miles from the nearest paved road, often isolated by heavy snow.

Smith’s anti-modernization philosophies were not just for the comic page. He lived them. He worried, in print, about children losing their dreaming innocence to the rat race. And then he would get up the next morning and draw the strip again, because, as he admitted, the martini wouldn’t keep him quiet.