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

This Sunday broadsheet page from the *St. Louis Republic* carries full-page department-store advertising rather than a comic strip — no panels, characters, or sequential art are visible in this reproduction. The page does, however, belong to the precise era when American Sunday newspapers were inventing the comic form: Frederick Opper's *Happy Hooligan*, launched in 1900 for Hearst's syndicate, ran on pages exactly like this one, its tin-canned tramp stumbling through gag sequences that codified recurring characters, multi-panel flow, and expressive linework. Those syndicated Sunday pages — alongside Outcault's *Yellow Kid* and Dirks's *Katzenjammer Kids* — established the visual grammar that comic books would later collect, reprint, and inherit wholesale.