Home Guard Holmes

I.F. Sullivan's *Home Guard Holmes* deploys the visual language that newspaper comics had crystallized by the 1910s: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, and escalating sight gags. Here, a rooftop periscope—a homefront security device—alerts a sentry to intruders, leading to the comic payoff: the inventor's proud claim of merit from the Home Defense League. The strip's economy of line and clear panel progression typify the dailies and Sunday pages that formed the direct ancestry of the comic book form, where artists working for newspapers developed the grammar of closure, timing, and character that later defined the medium.