Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, March 27, 1904

This Sunday page from the *St. Louis Republic* runs three separate strips on one broadsheet. The lead strip, 'Montmorency Meets His Friend Lord Chumpchester,' follows the tin-canned tramp Happy Hooligan as he introduces his aristocratic English acquaintance to a beat cop — predictably ending in arrest. Below it, 'Weary Waggles Got More Exercise Than He Wanted' tracks another down-and-out wanderer through a six-panel slapstick chase. Frederick Burr Opper created Happy Hooligan in 1900 for Hearst's syndicate; the strip's recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons helped codify the visual grammar that newspaper Sunday pages — produced years before any bound comic book existed — handed directly to the medium. Opper's loose, rubbery line and rapid panel-to-panel escalation became a template that cartoonists studied for decades.