The Newlyweds by George McManus

George McManus's The Newlyweds depicts a young couple navigating domestic mishaps through eight sequential panels. The strip's narrative unfolds across the page via recurring characters, speech balloons, and varied panel sizes—visual conventions that became foundational to American comics. McManus employs slapstick humor grounded in everyday married life: a snowball fight escalates into chaos, ending with the couple covered in snow. The Sunday newspaper format allowed for elaborate sight gags and physical comedy. The Newlyweds ran from 1904 into the 1920s and exemplifies how newspaper comic strips—appearing in daily and Sunday editions—established the visual language and serialized storytelling that would define the emerging comic book medium.