Happy Hooligan — 1901-07-21

Six panels follow Happy Hooligan, Opper's tin-canned tramp, at a seaside fairground shooting gallery where his head serves as the target—two cigars awarded per hit. A barker promotes the game; Happy, battered panel by panel, becomes a crowd-pleasing spectacle until the final gag crowns him with a "national reputation." Opper's line is loose and rubbery, his speech balloons packed with comic dialect, and his timing purely cinematic. *Happy Hooligan* ran from 1900 to 1932 in Hearst papers, making Opper one of the founding architects of the American Sunday page—the format whose recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons directly seeded what collectors would later bind and call comic books.