The Newlyweds by George McManus

George McManus's *The Newlyweds* follows a young married couple navigating domestic life and consumer culture. Here, the husband resists his bride's plea for new clothes, citing budget constraints while she counters with the expense of imported fashions. McManus employs the visual conventions established by early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, repeated characters across episodes, and physical comedy. The strip's humor derives from the clash between marital aspiration and economic reality—a theme that resonated with early-twentieth-century readers. *The Newlyweds* exemplifies how daily newspaper strips provided artists a laboratory for refining panel composition, timing, and character consistency that would later define comic books themselves.