Spareribs and Gravy by George McManus

George McManus's Spareribs and Gravy exemplifies the Sunday newspaper comic format that defined early twentieth-century visual storytelling. The strip employs sequential panels with speech balloons to track a narrative across multiple scenes, establishing the visual grammar that would become fundamental to comic books. McManus constructs humor through physical comedy and character interaction, moving the action across distinct settings. The Sunday page format—combining full-width panels with smaller compartments—required artists to balance readability with compositional variety. Published in The San Francisco Call, the strip appeared alongside hundreds of others competing for newspaper space, a competitive arena where innovations in layout, pacing, and character design directly influenced the emergence of the modern comic book medium.