Happy Hooligan — 1901-05-26

Six panels follow Happy Hooligan, Opper's tin-canned everyman, as he misreads a stranger's secret-society hand signals as a violent assault on a nearby gentleman. Happy intervenes, gets arrested, then — in a neat twist — the arresting officer turns out to be a lodge brother of the man Happy slugged. The strip moves cleanly left-to-right, top-to-bottom, each panel advancing through speech balloons that carry distinct voices. Opper, already a celebrated *Puck* cartoonist, launched Happy in 1900 for Hearst's syndicate. His fluid brushwork and expressive pantomime helped fix the visual conventions — recurring cast, panel grids, integrated dialogue — that Sunday newspaper pages carried directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.