Happy Hooligan — 1901-08-11

Six panels follow Happy Hooligan—tin-can hat, ragged coat, perpetual good intentions—as he tries to coax a woman's pet raccoon out of its doghouse. He dives in headfirst, yanks the animal out, and is promptly mauled; the woman shrieks "He's stealing my pet!"; a policeman arrives to haul Happy off. Opper's linework is loose and kinetic, dialogue rendered in dialect spelling inside crisp speech balloons. *Happy Hooligan* ran in Hearst papers from 1900 to 1932, and strips like it—Outcault's *Yellow Kid*, Dirks's *Katzenjammer Kids*—established the weekly color Sunday page as comics' founding form: recurring cast, sequential panels, integrated lettering, visual punch-line on the final beat. The grammar invented here passed directly into comic books.