Spareribs and Gravy Join the Insurgents

George McManus's Spareribs and Gravy unfolds across nine panels in a narrative of escalating domestic chaos. Two rotund characters wreak havoc through a neighborhood—overturning furniture, disrupting a street gathering, and ultimately fleeing the scene in a taxi. McManus employs the visual conventions that defined early newspaper comics: sequential panel layout, speech balloons advancing plot and gags, expressive caricature, and sight-gag humor dependent on physical action. The strip's Sunday placement in the Call represents the golden age of newspaper comics, when the Sunday funny pages became the primary vehicle for visual storytelling and character development. Artists like McManus established the formal language—panel borders, perspective, motion lines—that would become foundational to comic art.