Spareribs and Gravy Drop In on the King

George McManus's comic strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary emerging in early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, exaggerated body language, and slapstick timing. Two characters tumble repeatedly over a fence in escalating chaos, their misadventures building across eight panels toward a final punchline. McManus's clean linework and composition reflect the influence of earlier newspaper cartoonists like Richard Outcault, whose Hogan's Alley established recurring characters and panel-driven storytelling in the 1890s. Sunday comic sections like this one became laboratories for the visual grammar—splash panels, sight gags, character types—that would define American comics for decades.