Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, May 1, 1904

This full Sunday page from the *St. Louis Republic* runs two strips. The top half is "The Submarine Adventures of Happy Hooligan and His Brother Montmorecy" by Frederick Burr Opper — six panels in which the hapless tin-can-hatted Hooligan and his mustachioed brother encounter a shark, someone cries "Help," and the sequence ends in a wet, chaotic brawl, all rendered in Opper's loose, energetic ink line with crowded speech balloons. Below sits "Poor Grandpa," a footrace gag strip: boys challenge Grandpa to run alongside a fence, he cheats by running on the other side, and wins hands up. Opper, a veteran of *Puck* magazine, launched *Happy Hooligan* in 1900 for Hearst's syndicate. These Sunday pages — with their recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated lettered dialogue — directly established the visual and narrative conventions that American comic books would codify four decades later.