Spareribs and Gravy Were Looking for Excitement

By George McManus, this Sunday strip follows two characters through an escalating series of mishaps. The narrative unfolds across eight panels: Spareribs and Gravy encounter a cannon, which misfires, launching them into water, across land, into trees, and finally toward a taxi. McManus employs the visual vocabulary of early newspaper comics—sequential panels, speech balloons, exaggerated action poses, and physical comedy—that became foundational to the medium. The strip appeared in The San Francisco Call's comic section, part of the Sunday newspaper pages where comics first flourished as a distinct art form, establishing the panel-based narrative structure that would define comic books.