This page from the New-York Tribune's Sunday edition does not actually reproduce a comic strip; it carries the Chronicle and Comment of the Stage, a full broadsheet page of theatrical news, production photographs, and play listings for the week of September 29, 1918. Portraits of John Barrymore, Francine Larrimore, Jane Cowl, Cyril Maude, and others fill the header. Happy Hooligan, Frederick Burr Opper's beloved tin-can-hatted tramp, ran in Hearst papers from 1900 and helped establish the recurring Sunday-page character as a commercial and artistic institution — but no strip panel appears on this page. Opper, alongside Richard Outcault and Rudolph Dirks, codified speech balloons and sequential panel grammar that directly seeded the comic-book format born in the 1930s.
About this artifact
- Date
- September 29, 1918
- 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.