Spareribs and Gravy Still Have Their Thirst

By George McManus, this Sunday strip follows two recurring characters through a six-panel narrative of domestic scheming and physical comedy. The protagonist and his companion plot to acquire food and drink, executing their plan across indoor and outdoor settings with escalating slapstick results. McManus employs sequential panel composition, speech balloons, and expressive figure drawing—the visual vocabulary that newspaper comics pioneered in the early twentieth century. The strip's episodic structure and character-driven humor typify the Sunday funny papers that preceded the comic book industry, establishing conventions of layout, pacing, and visual gag construction that defined American sequential art.