From the exhibition
The Newlyweds by George McManus
· February 11, 1912

George McManus's *The Newlyweds* follows a young married couple through domestic mishaps and slapstick predicaments. Each panel advances the narrative through sequential action: a wife slips on a floor, a husband tumbles down stairs, a maid reports chaos. McManus employs the visual vocabulary of early newspaper comics—speech balloons, varied panel sizes, and expressive character poses—to deliver humor through physical comedy and domestic situations. The strip appeared in Sunday newspapers nationwide, part of the Sunday supplement tradition that established recurring characters and serialized storytelling as central to American comic art, directly prefiguring the comic book format.
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