The Newlyweds by George McManus

McManus's *The Newlyweds* strips the Sunday page, depicting a young couple navigating domestic life with visual humor rooted in shared living spaces and marital situations. The strip employs sequential panels with speech balloons to establish character relationships and sight gags—a husband observing his wife's housekeeping efforts, children underfoot, cramped quarters. McManus helped establish the visual vocabulary of comics: consistent character design across panels, caption-driven action, and domestic scenarios drawn from contemporary urban life. The newspaper Sunday comics page was the primary venue for sequential art before comic books; strips like this circulated nationally, reaching millions of readers and proving the commercial viability of recurring characters and domestic comedy. McManus's work influenced the visual grammar that would define American comics for decades.