The Newlyweds

George McManus's The Newlyweds follows a young married couple through domestic mishaps, here navigating rain and an umbrella in escalating comic chaos. McManus employs the formal vocabulary of early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, and physical slapstick gags that build across frames. The strip's Sunday format allowed larger illustrations and more elaborate visual storytelling than daily strips. The Newlyweds became one of the foundational strips of the 1910s, establishing the sitcom-like domestic comedy that would influence American comics for decades. McManus's precise draftsmanship and panel composition helped establish visual conventions still used in cartooning today.