The "Hurry Up" New Yorker, No. 9—When He Watches the Bulletin Board

Maurice Ketten's "Hurry Up" New Yorker strips exemplify the visual storytelling conventions solidifying in early-1900s newspaper comics. Six panels follow a mustached protagonist's frantic rush to a football game, using sequential art to build comic momentum: dialogue balloons advance plot and character, while repeated figures in varied poses create narrative flow. The strip's format—Sunday page layout with numbered panels—reflects how newspaper comics adopted and refined techniques from earlier chromolithographic humor and European sequential art. By the 1900s, such strips had become vehicles for standardizing the visual grammar of comics: panel borders demarcating time and action, speech balloons for dialogue, exaggerated proportions for comedic effect. These Sunday pages in major newspapers served as the direct precursor to the comic books that would emerge in the 1930s.