Happy Hooligan — 1901-08-25

Six panels follow Hooligan — the tin-canned optimist in his signature battered hat — as he offers to carry a woman's basket of eggs across slippery stepping stones, promptly falls and smashes them, earns a scolding and a threat of arrest from a constable, and ends the strip worse off than he started. Opper's line is economical and rubbery, his speech balloons integrated naturally into each composition. Syndicated through Hearst from 1900, *Happy Hooligan* ran for over two decades and helped establish the recurring-character Sunday page as a commercial institution. Opper, already a veteran *Puck* cartoonist, brought professional draftsmanship to the new format — panel-to-panel continuity, consistent characterization, and physical comedy timed across the grid — practices that would flow directly into the first comic books assembled from such reprinted strips in the 1930s.