The "Hurry Up" New Yorker

Maurice Ketten's comic strip follows a harried businessman rushing through New York City, late for an appointment. Across six panels, the protagonist dodges pedestrians, commandeers a horse, and narrowly avoids disaster—each mishap punctuated by dialogue balloons capturing his mounting panic. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comic storytelling: sequential panels advance narrative action, expressive line work conveys urgency and motion, and recurring character types (loafers, pedestrians, authority figures) populate a recognizable urban setting. Such Sunday page strips and daily installments established the visual vocabulary and structural conventions—panel grids, speech balloons, character consistency—that would become foundational to the emerging comic book medium.