The Newlyweds—Their Baby

George McManus's The Newlyweds follows a young married couple managing their first baby—a domestic comedy told through eight panels of escalating chaos. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comic conventions: speech balloons, sequential action across a grid, and recurring characters in situational humor. By 1911, such Sunday strips anchored newspaper sections and demonstrated the visual language—panel borders, gesture, facial expression—that would define comics as a medium. McManus's domestic scenarios appealed to urban readers navigating modern middle-class life, establishing the sitcom formula decades before television.