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From the exhibition

The Newlyweds by George McManus

· 1912

The Newlyweds by George McManus
George McManus's *The Newlyweds* follows a young married couple through domestic mishaps, each panel advancing the narrative with speech balloons and sequential action. The strip's visual grammar—discrete rectangular panels, dialogue integrated into the scene, recurring characters in familiar settings—exemplifies the newspaper comic strip's formal vocabulary. McManus's work appeared in Sunday editions alongside *Splinters* and *Makin' B'lieve*, establishing the comic page as a vehicle for domestic humor. These strips helped define the medium's commercial and artistic foundations during the early twentieth century, when newspaper Sunday pages served as the primary venue for sequential narrative art before the comic book emerged as a distinct format.

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