Foxy Grandpa and Comic Strip Characters, 1906

This political cartoon celebrates the newspaper comic strip as a democratic force, depicting beloved characters from the Sunday pages alongside working-class boys. Foxy Grandpa hangs upside down from a tree branch, addressing a crowd that includes figures from *The Katzenjammer Kids*, *Happy Hooligan*, and *Alphonse and Gaston*—strips that reached millions through mass circulation. By 1906, newspaper comics had become a distinct visual medium with their own vocabulary: sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters that appealed across class lines. Louis M. Glackens's illustration recognizes how strips like these, drawn by Rudolph Dirks, Frederick Burr Opper, and Carl E. Schultze, shaped popular culture and gave ordinary people access to humor that had once been confined to elite publications.