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

This full Sunday page from *The St. Louis Republic* carries two strips. The top, Jimmy—He Rushes for a Cab!, follows a small boy battling wind and rain across a repeated sequence of panels anchored by a livery-stable sign—the joke is pure repetition and accumulation, the umbrella inverting panel after panel. Below it, Happy Hooligan's Brother Montmorency Inherits a Fortune, Frederick Burr Opper's long-running strip, shows the bumbling tin-can-hatted Hooligan seeing his dapper brother off on a transatlantic liner, only to watch the voyage go immediately wrong. Opper's loose, rubbery line and dense speech balloons are everywhere here. Sunday newspaper pages like this one—printed in sections, sold for a penny—were the direct structural and commercial ancestor of the comic book, establishing the recurring character, the multi-panel sequence, and the visual grammar that American comics have used ever since.