Al Smith was an American cartoonist whose work included a long run on the comic strip Mutt and Jeff. Comics historian R. C. Harvey postulates that Smith's nearly 50-year run on the strip was, at the time of Smith's retirement, a world record for longevity. Smith also ran a comic strip syndication service — mainly serving weekly newspapers — from the 1950s until the late 1990s.

Mutt and Jeff is a long-running and widely popular American newspaper comic strip created by cartoonist Bud Fisher in 1907 about "two mismatched tinhorns". It is commonly regarded as the first daily comic strip. The concept of a newspaper strip featuring recurring characters in multiple panels on a six-day-a-week schedule had previously been pioneered through the short-lived A. Piker Clerk by Clare Briggs, but it was Mutt and Jeff as the first successful daily comic strip that staked out the direction of the future trend.