Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, January 10, 1904

Six panels follow the tin-canned tramp Happy Hooligan as he takes a job as a sandwich-board man for the Glorioso Shoe ($1.25). His brother Gloomy Gus warns him off, but Happy lugs the oversized boot-shaped sign through slapstick collisions — the sign swats bystanders, a policeman clubs Happy, chaos accumulates with clockwork logic. Frederick Burr Opper drew the strip for Hearst papers from 1900; this Sunday page ran in the *St. Louis Republic*. Opper, a veteran illustrator trained in political cartooning, was among the first artists to lock recurring characters into weekly episodic strips — the same visual grammar, panel-to-panel cause-and-effect, and speech-balloon dialogue that Sunday supplement editors at Hearst and Pulitzer were assembling into the direct structural ancestor of the comic book.