The "Hurry Up" New Yorker: When He Goes to Lunch

Maurice Ketten's Sunday comic strip follows a harried businessman's frantic lunch hour. The protagonist rushes from his office, argues about restaurant crowding, orders two sandwiches in five minutes, and returns to work in chaos. The strip employs sequential panels with speech balloons to build comedic momentum through physical comedy and escalating absurdity. Newspaper comic strips like this one established the visual vocabulary—panel layout, dialogue placement, character consistency—that would become fundamental to comic book storytelling. The Sunday pages were where artists experimented with extended narratives and visual gags that influenced all comics to follow.