Happy Hooligan — 1901-12-15

Six panels follow Happy Hooligan — his tin-can hat and bumbling goodwill instantly recognizable — as he tries to deliver a forgotten letter for a woman at her window. He chases down the wrong man, earns a beating, and is dragged off by police, the strip's habitual finale. Opper's brushwork is confident and economical: brick walls recede in flat perspective, speech balloons drive every beat, and the gag machinery runs on pure misidentification. Frederick Burr Opper launched *Happy Hooligan* in Hearst papers in 1900, and these Sunday pages — alongside *The Yellow Kid* and *Katzenjammer Kids* — established the recurring cast, sequential panel grammar, and balloon-driven dialogue that American comic books would inherit wholesale two generations later.