Think adult animation is new? "Feline Follies" staring Felix the Cat, features Felix losing his job, becoming homeless, having an unplanned pregnancy then committing suicide.
What strikes me about this cartoon is how flippantly treated his suicide is. As a "blink and you'll miss it" throw away gag at the very end.
This unintentionally gives us a glimpse into how much the specter of death before loomed over everyone's lives before that discovery of antibiotics.
Now a days whenever there's a brutal death in a cartoon, there's always a lingering over the carnage. You can practically feel the animators leaning over their creations, drinking in your distress as you reel from the shock.
But in this cartoon violence is just taken in stride and is given no more weight than a clown honking his nose.
I don't think people really understand how much antibiotics and vaccines changed the social landscape. Sudden death was treated as much of a matter of course in life as having a bad day, or breaking up with someone. It was something that people just lived with and didn't give too much importance to because, what could you do?
That relationship with death is just not present anymore in society, so depicting death in such an unthinking way just couldn't be done anymore. People wouldn't get it.
But the people of 1919 did, and probably laughed at the thought in the same way someone will laugh today at an especially cutting zinger.
And it's not like 1919 is ancient history, so it's interesting to see how dramatically everyday life has changed in such a relatively short period of time.
You can watch "Felix Follies" for yourself at archive.org
https://archive.org/details/FelixTheCat-FelineFollies1919