The Newlyweds

George McManus's *The Newlyweds* exemplifies the comic strip's golden age, when Sunday papers presented six-panel gag sequences. Here, a husband attempts to retrieve his hat from a street lamp while his wife watches with bemusement. McManus employs visual storytelling conventions—sequential panels, speech balloons, and physical comedy—that became foundational to comics. The strip's recurring characters and domestic scenarios made it a newspaper fixture, while its panel-to-panel clarity and slapstick humor established templates other artists would refine for decades. Early strips like this, appearing in mass-circulation dailies and Sundays, functioned as the direct predecessors to comic books, training readers in the visual grammar that would define the medium.