Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, May 15, 1904

Six panels follow the tin-canned tramp Happy Hooligan and his top-hatted brother Montmorency through a society gathering, where a precious vase passes hand to hand before shattering — the strip's signature arc of good intention colliding with chaos. Frederick Burr Opper's loose, rubbery line gives each character a distinct silhouette readable at tabloid scale. Below the strip, the page fills with short prose humor columns, illustrating how Sunday comics shared space with text features in the broadsheet format. Opper launched *Happy Hooligan* in 1900 for Hearst syndication, making it one of the first strips to sustain a recurring cast across weekly installments — a structural habit that collectors of bound Sunday pages would eventually call a comic book.