Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, December 25, 1904

Two strips share this Christmas Sunday page. The top six panels follow Happy Hooligan — Frederick Burr Opper's good-natured tramp in his battered tin-can hat — as he calls on English acquaintances, greeting them with cheerful holiday wishes and receiving increasingly rough treatment in return, each panel ending in physical humiliation. Below it, Goodrich Mudd's Christmas Surprise runs six panels tracking a hapless burglar who tries sliding down a chimney to escape a cop, gets stuck inside a wealthy house, and meets a comic comeuppance. Both strips use speech balloons, numbered panels, and broad slapstick pacing — the visual grammar Opper, Outcault, and their peers were standardizing in Hearst and Pulitzer Sunday supplements through the 1890s–1900s, the direct formal ancestor of the comic book.