The Newlyweds by George McManus

McManus's *The Newlyweds* strips the domestic sitcom down to its essentials: a young wife navigates kitchen disasters while her husband observes from below, literally crawling through the lower panels. The Sunday page deploys the six-panel grid standard to newspaper comics, each panel advancing the gag through physical comedy and speech balloons. The strip ran from 1904 to 1912, establishing the recurring-character format that newspapers and later comic books would exploit. McManus's clean linework and sequential clarity shaped how readers parsed visual narrative—the vocabulary of comics itself—years before comic books collected these strips into bound form.