The Newlyweds by George McManus

George McManus's *The Newlyweds* follows a young married couple navigating domestic life through visual comedy. The strip employs sequential panels with speech balloons to build gags across multiple frames—a narrative technique essential to the emerging comic form. McManus uses varied panel sizes and composition to control pacing and emphasis, allowing readers to follow both action and dialogue. The strip's humor derives from situational mishaps and character interaction rather than slapstick alone, establishing patterns that would define newspaper comics. By 1912, strips like this appeared regularly in Sunday supplements nationwide, establishing the visual vocabulary and narrative structures that later informed the comic book industry.