Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, May 1, 1904

This full Sunday page from the St. Louis Republic runs two strips. The top half is "The Submarine Adventures of Happy Hooligan and His Brother Montmorecy" by Frederick Burr Opper — six panels in which the hapless tin-can-hatted Hooligan and his mustachioed brother encounter a shark, someone cries "Help," and the sequence ends in a wet, chaotic brawl, all rendered in Opper's loose, energetic ink line with crowded speech balloons. Below sits "Poor Grandpa," a footrace gag strip: boys challenge Grandpa to run alongside a fence, he cheats by running on the other side, and wins hands up. Opper, a veteran of Puck magazine, launched Happy Hooligan in 1900 for Hearst's syndicate. These Sunday pages — with their recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated lettered dialogue — directly established the visual and narrative conventions that American comic books would codify four decades later.