The "Hurry Up" New Yorker No. 14—When His Tooth Hurts

Maurice Ketten's comic strip follows a hurried Manhattan character racing to the dentist with a severe toothache. The strip employs the visual conventions that defined early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, exaggerated motion lines, and recurring protagonists caught in urban predicaments. The frantic pacing—emphasized through diagonal compositions and overlapping action—captures the comedic chaos of modern city life. Published in the era when newspaper strips functioned as the primary sequential art medium, before comic books as bound collections existed, such Sunday pages and daily strips established the visual grammar and narrative structures that would become foundational to the comic book form.