The Newlyweds

George McManus's *The Newlyweds* follows a young married couple and their infant son through domestic situations rendered in six-panel layouts. Here, a detective arrives to investigate a mysterious missing collar—a setup for visual gags playing on misunderstanding and slapstick. McManus employs the formal vocabulary of early newspaper comics: individual panels separated by borders, speech balloons anchoring dialogue, and recurring characters in familiar settings. The strip exemplifies how Sunday newspaper pages and daily serials established the medium's visual language in the early 1900s, developing techniques—sequential narrative, character consistency, sight gags—that became foundational to comic books. McManus was among the cartoonists whose newspaper work directly shaped how stories could be told through pictures and words.