Home Guard Holmes

J. F. Sullivan's *Home Guard Holmes* follows a bumbling home-front sentinel enforcing a boundary line during World War I. The three-panel strip uses the visual conventions that had crystallized in American newspapers by the 1910s: sequential panels, speech balloons, and a recurring character caught in comic predicament. The joke turns on the guard's strict instruction against crossing his line—which prowlers then violate in increasingly cheeky ways while he chases them. Sullivan deploys hatching, gesture, and exaggerated proportion typical of newspaper comic art, where panels moved readers left to right through escalating comic chaos. Such strips populated Sunday supplements and daily papers nationwide, establishing the formal language that would anchor comic books when the medium emerged in the 1930s.