The Newlyweds

George McManus's *The Newlyweds* depicts a young couple navigating domestic life around a Christmas tree, surrounded by toys and gifts. The strip employs the visual conventions that defined early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, expressive line work, and recurring characters in familiar situations. Published in the Sunday comics section of *The San Francisco Call*, this strip exemplifies how newspapers became the primary venue for developing the medium's visual language. The domestic comedy genre—chronicling the mishaps and adjustments of married life—proved enormously popular in early-twentieth-century papers, establishing a template that would persist throughout the comic strip era.