Spareribs and Gravy

George McManus's Spareribs and Gravy appeared in The San Francisco Call's Sunday comic section. The strip follows two young characters and a dog through domestic misadventures involving an oversized pot of gravy—the visual gag escalates across eight panels as the pot swells and ruptures, flooding the household. McManus employs the grammar of early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, clear sightlines establishing cause and effect, and physical humor that builds momentum. The recurring characters and domestic setting were standard for Sunday pages, which by 1912 had become the primary venue where cartoonists developed the visual vocabulary that would define comic books.