The Newlyweds

George McManus's *The Newlyweds* appeared on Sunday newspaper comic pages alongside competing strips like *Splinters* and *Makin' B'lieve*. The strip follows a young married couple through domestic situations rendered in sequential panels with speech balloons—visual conventions that newspapers had standardized by the early 1900s. McManus uses exaggerated body language and slapstick physical comedy to generate humor from marital misunderstandings and household mishaps. The Sunday page format permitted large illustrations and expansive narratives, allowing comic artists to develop character-driven humor across multiple tiers. Such newspaper strips became laboratories for the visual language that would define American comic books.