Happy Hooligan — 1901-06-09

Six panels follow Happy Hooligan—tin-can hat, round blank face, perpetual good intentions—as he rushes to rescue a man crying "save me from that ruffian who wants to rob me!" Happy chases off the attacker, only to grab what turns out to be Edward VII; a keeper then arrives claiming Happy just escaped the asylum. The confronted stranger declares himself the Czar of Russia; a third, the Sultan of Turkey; a final bystander, Li Hung Chang. Happy ends battered and bewildered. Opper's loose brushwork, expressive silhouettes, and rhythmic panel-to-panel staging exemplify the Sunday-page language he helped invent at Hearst's *New York Journal* from 1900 onward—speech balloons, recurring characters, sequential gags—the direct formal ancestor of the comic book.