What Will Spareribs and Gravy Get?

George McManus's Spareribs and Gravy unfolds across eight panels in a straightforward narrative sequence. Two figures—one thin, one round—navigate a city street and interior spaces in escalating comic chaos. McManus employs the visual vocabulary already standard in Sunday newspaper comics: rectangular panels in orderly rows, speech balloons carrying dialogue, exaggerated body language, and recurring characters. The strip exemplifies how newspaper comics of the 1910s functioned as self-contained gag sequences, building toward a punchline. McManus would later create Bringing Up Father (1913), which became one of the era's most widely syndicated strips. These Sunday comic sections were the direct ancestors of the comic book format, establishing panel layout, character design, and sequential storytelling conventions that would define the medium for decades.