The "Hurry Up" New Yorker, No. 19—When His Wife Sends Him on an Errand

Maurice Ketten's comic strip follows a man hurried by his wife to fetch a hair sample for a dresser, then sent on increasingly absurd errands. The six-panel layout uses sequential narrative—a hallmark of early newspaper comics—with speech balloons advancing the story through dialogue and sight gags. The "Hurry Up" New Yorker series, appearing in the Sunday pages, exemplifies the physical comedy and domestic humor that defined turn-of-the-century comic strips. Ketten's exaggerated linework and character expressions derive from vaudeville and music-hall traditions, showing how newspaper comics borrowed visual conventions from popular entertainment while establishing their own visual grammar of panels and recurring situations.