The Newlyweds

*The Newlyweds* by George McManus follows a young married couple through domestic mishaps and small crises. Here, the husband encounters a series of obstacles—a cat, locked doors, unhelpful landlords—while trying to accomplish simple tasks. McManus employs the visual vocabulary pioneered by newspaper comics: rectangular panels arranged in sequence, speech balloons, and varied perspectives to track action across the page. The strip's humor derives from physical comedy and situational irony rendered through sequential art. *The Newlyweds* was among the popular Sunday and daily strips that established the formal grammar of comics in the early twentieth century, before comic books collected these newspaper strips into bound volumes.