The Newlyweds

George McManus's *The Newlyweds* follows a young married couple navigating domestic life through humor rooted in everyday conflicts—babysitting decisions, in-law visits, and household management. The strip employs the formal vocabulary of early newspaper comics: multiple horizontal panels, speech balloons advancing plot and gags, and recurring characters whose relationships deepen across installments. McManus's draftsmanship and sequential storytelling were hallmarks of the Sunday page format that dominated newspapers in the 1910s. These serialized domestic comedies, appearing weekly in broadsheet editions, established the structural and visual conventions—panel layout, visual continuity, character arcs—that became foundational to the comic book medium as it emerged decades later.