Spareribs and Gravy Face a Woof-Nuff Jury

George McManus's Spareribs and Gravy appeared in Sunday newspaper comic sections, following the format established by The Yellow Kid and other strip pioneers. The narrative unfolds across eight panels, tracking two anthropomorphic characters through a courtroom scene with a dog jury. McManus employs the visual vocabulary that became standard in comics: bordered panels guiding sequential action, speech balloons anchoring dialogue, and exaggerated physical comedy. The strip demonstrates how newspaper comics functioned as serialized humor for mass audiences, their episodic gags and recurring characters creating reader loyalty. Sunday comics pages like this one were among the first publications to systematize the panel-and-balloon grammar that would define the medium for decades.