Fuller Bunk: 'It Was a Secret Easily Kept'

A four-panel comic strip by Meyer Marcus featuring two men in suits and hats engaged in a rapid comic exchange. The first character confesses he's startled the second; the second demands secrecy about needing to borrow money; the first promises to keep it quiet; the final panel reveals the secret was unnecessary—he'd never heard of it anyway. The strip demonstrates the visual conventions that became standard in newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, character expressions that drive the humor, and a punchline structure rooted in verbal misunderstanding. Published during the First World War era when comic strips appeared regularly in American newspapers, this piece exemplifies the daily humor that preceded the comic book format while establishing the grammar of sequential art that would define the medium.