Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, February 14, 1904

Nine panels follow the bumbling Hooligan and his better-dressed brother Montmorency through a slapstick spiral: a warm arrival, a dog altercation, a street brawl, and the inevitable policeman hauling both men off. Signed by F. Opper in the lower-right corner, the strip runs in the broad, loose brushwork Opper had refined since launching *Happy Hooligan* in 1900 for Hearst's syndicate. Speech balloons anchor every exchange; repeated character silhouettes carry continuity across panels without captions — exactly the visual shorthand Sunday comics were teaching readers to parse. These weekly full-page color sheets, competing fiercely across Hearst and Pulitzer papers, established the recurring-character strip as a commercial form and laid the structural groundwork from which the comic book would directly descend thirty years later.