The "Hurry Up" New Yorker No. 16—When He Runs for Office

Maurice Ketten's comic strip follows a frantic candidate racing through Election Day. The kinetic protagonist—all coattails and flailing limbs—bounces between voters, a hurried officeholder anxious about discussing policy. Speech balloons track his contradictory promises: two votes controlled, three votes controlled, four votes controlled. The strip's visual grammar—sequential panels, exaggerated poses, rapid dialogue—exemplifies early newspaper comics' slapstick momentum. By 1906, the Sunday newspaper page had become the laboratory where American comic art developed its vocabulary: recurring characters, panel flow, and the readable confusion of urban life transformed into visual gags. Ketten's loose ink style and compressed action capture the period's fascination with the speed and chaos of modern politics.