Hoist, the Friend of the Comic People

This Puck magazine cartoon by Louis M. Glackens celebrates newspaper comics as popular entertainment, depicting beloved strip characters—Happy Hooligan, Alphonse and Gaston, Foxy Grandpa, Buster Brown, and The Katzenjammer Kids—hoisting a donkey labeled "Maud" aloft. Created by pioneering cartoonists like Frederick Burr Opper and Rudolph Dirks, these strips established visual conventions still used today: recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons. By 1906, Sunday comic sections had become major circulation drivers for newspapers. The image reflects how quickly comic strips evolved from novelties into a recognized art form and cultural force, with audiences invested in following familiar characters week after week.