Mr. Happihome

Walter Wellman's *Mr. Happihome* strips the comfort from domesticity through physical comedy and visual gags. The narrative flows across six panels tracking a husband's misadventures: evicted by his landlord, rebuffed by his wife, turned away as a beggar, and ultimately humbled. Wellman deploys the formal vocabulary of newspaper comics—sequential panels, speech balloons carrying dialogue and asides, exaggerated body language—to chart social embarrassment and marital discord. The strip's humor hinges on the gap between aspiration and outcome, between the gentleman's formal dress and his shabby circumstances. This brand of domestic satire populated early twentieth-century Sunday pages, where serialized characters and recurring situations evolved from single-panel gags into sustained narratives that would define the emerging medium.