The Newlyweds—Their Baby

By George McManus, this domestic comedy follows a young husband's escalating panic as his baby wreaks havoc in an office chair. The strip's nine-panel grid demonstrates the visual storytelling conventions emerging in early newspaper comics: sequential action, speech balloons advancing plot, and escalating slapstick. The baby's destruction—spinning the chair faster, scattering papers—builds to the father's frantic state while the infant remains gleefully oblivious. The Newlyweds typified Sunday funny pages of the 1910s, where recurring characters and domestic situations offered middle-class audiences humor drawn from everyday life. McManus's clean line work and clear panel progression helped establish the visual grammar that would define American comic strips and, eventually, the comic book format itself.