This Sunday page from The Republic (St. Louis, April 5, 1903) does not actually reproduce a comic strip: the full broadsheet is a department-store advertisement for B. Nugent & Bros. Dry Goods, announcing spring and Easter merchandise. No strip panels, speech balloons, or cartoon characters are visible on this page. The catalog assigns the date to Happy Hooligan — Frederick Burr Opper's beloved tin-can-hatted tramp, syndicated by Hearst from 1900 — whose Sunday pages pioneered sequential panel storytelling alongside Outcault's Yellow Kid and Dirks's Katzenjammer Kids, the direct ancestors of the comic book format. The strip itself does not appear on this surviving page.
About this artifact
- Date
- April 5, 1903
- Rights
- Public domain — free to view, share, and reuse.
- Restoration
- Digitally restored and hosted by ComicBooks.com · high-resolution version available.
Part of our mission to preserve and restore the public-domain heritage of the medium.