The Newlyweds

George McManus's *The Newlyweds* follows a young married couple and their infant through domestic routines rendered in six-panel strips. Here, a husband's goodbye to his wife spirals into miscommunication: she interprets his request for a goodbye kiss as an instruction to kiss the baby, triggering a comedic reversal when he must clarify his intention. McManus employs consistent character design, sequential panel flow, and speech balloons to build gags through visual and verbal timing—techniques central to newspaper comic vocabulary. The strip's humor depends on recognizable middle-class situations and the visual shorthand of hats, clothing, and body language that made comics accessible to millions of daily readers in the early twentieth century.