Home Guard Holmes

J.F. Sullivan's *Home Guard Holmes* depicts a civilian patrol volunteer discovering a submarine gun emplacement along the coast. The strip's humor derives from the contrast between the character's enthusiastic but bumbling efforts at coastal defense and the actual military threat. Sullivan employs sequential panels with speech balloons to chart the protagonist's comic misadventure—discovering heavy gun covers, struggling with equipment, and finally spotting what he mistakes for enemy activity. This wartime newspaper comic reflects how American comic strips mobilized domestic anxieties about World War I invasion fears while maintaining humor through slapstick and visual gags. Such dailies formed the direct precursor to comic book anthology formats, establishing the panel-driven narrative structure and character-centered humor that would define the medium.