The "Hurry Up" New Yorker

Maurice Ketten's Sunday strip follows a frantic New Yorker through a shopping expedition gone awry. The protagonist—a thin, elastic figure in bowler hat—rushes through department store aisles in pursuit of his wife, creating slapstick chaos across nine panels. The comic employs the emerging visual vocabulary of newspaper comics: sequential panels advancing narrative action, speech balloons advancing dialogue, and a recurring protagonist whose exaggerated body contortions carry the gag. The strip's title plays on the era's cultural anxiety about urban pace and female shopping habits. Published in Sunday newspaper supplements, such strips established the formal grammar that would define comic books: they trained readers to follow action across bordered panels and taught artists how to convey motion and character through line and layout.