The Newlyweds—Their Baby

George McManus's The Newlyweds follows a young couple navigating domestic life with their infant through a single week. The strip uses sequential panels with speech balloons—visual conventions that newspaper comics were standardizing in the early 1900s. Each day's episode shows the husband and wife in different domestic scenarios, establishing character types that would recur weekly. McManus's clean linework and readable layouts made the strip accessible to mass audiences. By 1911, Sunday comic pages had become essential to newspaper circulation, and artists like McManus were developing the visual grammar—panel borders, gesture, spatial flow—that would define the emerging medium of comic books.