The "Hurry Up" New Yorker: When She Goes Visiting

Maurice Ketten's Sunday strip follows a frazzled woman navigating the social chaos of making house calls in New York. The narrative unfolds across nine panels: a carriage mishap, a rushed descent down tenement stairs, an awkward encounter at a friend's door, and escalating comic complications centered on gossip and social anxiety. Ketten uses speech balloons, sequential panel layout, and exaggerated body language—visual conventions emerging from the newspaper comic page. By the early 1900s, Sunday comics had become a major circulation driver for newspapers, establishing the formal language of comics: recurring characters, sight gags, and continuous narrative told through image and dialogue. This strip exemplifies how the medium combined vaudeville timing with graphic storytelling.