Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, March 27, 1904

This Sunday page from the St. Louis Republic runs three separate strips on one broadsheet. The lead strip, 'Montmorency Meets His Friend Lord Chumpchester,' follows the tin-canned tramp Happy Hooligan as he introduces his aristocratic English acquaintance to a beat cop — predictably ending in arrest. Below it, 'Weary Waggles Got More Exercise Than He Wanted' tracks another down-and-out wanderer through a six-panel slapstick chase. Frederick Burr Opper created Happy Hooligan in 1900 for Hearst's syndicate; the strip's recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons helped codify the visual grammar that newspaper Sunday pages — produced years before any bound comic book existed — handed directly to the medium. Opper's loose, rubbery line and rapid panel-to-panel escalation became a template that cartoonists studied for decades.