The Newlyweds—Their Baby

George McManus's *The Newlyweds* follows a young couple navigating domestic life with their newborn. This Sunday strip demonstrates the visual conventions codified in early newspaper comics: a nine-panel grid with speech balloons, recurring characters in domestic situations, and physical comedy built on escalating misunderstandings. The husband's repeated failures to keep the baby quiet—ultimately discovering the infant sleeps through chaos—play on slapstick timing perfected in vaudeville. McManus's clean linework and compositional clarity made the strip a syndication success, influencing how cartoonists structured narrative action across multiple panels. The strip ran from 1910 to 1912, helping establish the Sunday comics page as a distinct medium between newspaper illustration and emerging comic books.