The Newlyweds

George McManus's The Newlyweds follows a young married couple navigating domestic life through humor and sentiment. This Sunday page uses six panels to tell a complete story: caught in a rainstorm, the husband shelters his wife and infant under an umbrella while she worries about his health. The strip employs the visual conventions that defined early comics—sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters—establishing patterns later essential to comic books. McManus's clean linework and narrative structure made the strip a popular fixture in newspapers, where Sunday pages and daily strips served as the primary laboratory for developing the medium's visual language before the comic book emerged as a distinct format.