The Newlyweds

This Sunday comic strip follows a young couple and their infant son through domestic scenes of daily life. The humor turns on the baby's precocious behavior and the parents' earnest attempts to shape his conduct—naming him "Napoleon" in hopes he'll grow into the role, then trying to train him as a soldier. The strip employs the visual vocabulary that had crystallized by the early 1900s: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, and exaggerated expressions. Such newspaper comics became the foundation for the comic book industry that would follow, establishing the panel-based narrative form and character-driven seriality that defined the medium.