[5] Primarily producing strips for the two main publishers, DC Thomson and IPC Magazines, Smith was best known for drawing Judge Dredd for 2000 AD and the Daily Star.
[9] He was demobbed in 1947, and joined the Gaumont British animation studio,[10] alongside future comics artists Mike Western and Eric Bradbury.
[11] After Gaumont British's parent company, the Rank Organisation, went bust in 1949, Smith found work drawing comics for the Amalgamated Press under editor Leonard Matthews,[10] starting on Knockout with humour strips like "Deed-a-Day Danny"[12] and "Young Joey".
Smith was now married with a child and no longer wanted to live in bomb-damaged London, so Thomsons bought him a house outside Dundee, where they had their headquarters, paid for from deductions from his wages.
Strips he drew included "The Cowboy Cricketer", and "Nick Jolly", a fantasy story about an eighteenth-century highwayman brought forward in time by well-meaning aliens to fight the sinister arch-villain Simon Death on his robotic, jet-powered horse Bess.
Other Dredd stories which featured Smith at the peak of his powers were the Pat Mills scripted "Blood of Satanus" where he more than effectively depicted a man's transformation into a blood-thirsty Tyrannosaurus rex, "The Hot-Dog Run" featuring a group of cadet Judges on a training mission in the Cursed Earth and "The Graveyard Shift", an extended narrative covering one typically crime-filled night in Mega-City One.