The Newlyweds by George McManus

George McManus's *The Newlyweds* follows a young married couple through domestic misadventures, their physical comedy unfolding across six sequential panels. The husband and wife engage in exaggerated slapstick—tumbles, collisions, and bewildered reactions—conveyed through dynamic poses and speed lines characteristic of early comics. Speech balloons carry minimal dialogue; visual gags carry the narrative. McManus employs the formal panel grid that defines newspaper Sunday pages, establishing the sequential art vocabulary that would become the foundation of comic books. The strip's popularity in papers nationwide demonstrated that recurring characters and serialized humor could sustain reader interest, proving the commercial viability of the form that emerged from Sunday supplements in the 1890s.