The Newlyweds—Their Baby

George McManus's *The Newlyweds* strips a young marriage down to domestic comedy: a husband and wife navigate the chaos of their first baby with exaggerated physical reactions and deadpan banter. The gag repeats across eight panels—the baby cries, adults flinch and scramble, dialogue bubbles puncture the action. McManus deploys the grammar of newspaper comics: regular panel grids, speech balloons anchoring character voices, repeated settings (the bedroom, nursery furniture) that establish continuity. By 1911, such Sunday pages were the foundation of comic narrative, training readers to follow sequence and read pictures as movement. *The Newlyweds* ran nationally, a formulaic hit that proved domestic strife—especially parenthood—was reliable material for mass audiences.