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It's often hard to find information about topper strips (see my post from a couple days ago about Josie), but it's made a bit easier when the character in the topper is also a character in the main strip. Corky is the son of the main characters of the strip it's a topper for, Gasoline Alley, and regularly appeared in that strip as well as his own. In this way the topper became an extension of the main strip, rather than just an accessory for it. This didn't happen often with toppers, but Ernie Bushmiller also did it with Phil Fumble, and E.C. Segar did it with the various Thimble Theater characters that appeared in its toppers. There were probably others, but on the whole it wasn't really done, as the topper was seen as fairly disposable due to the fact that newspapers could just drop it if they wanted to save space.

I've written about Corky before, but Frank King's Gasoline Alley and its characters are always a great source for holiday cheer. Here we see Corky spending all of his money on candy and soda and not buying presents for his family, and then trying to use Santa Claus as a scapegoat. I don't know exactly how all the naughty or nice business works, but I have a sneaking suspicion that doing something like that is likely to get you a lump of coal in your stocking. I don't think Santa takes kindly to being used as a fall guy.