Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, October 5, 1902

Six panels follow the tin-canned tramp Happy Hooligan and his brother Gloomy Gus through an Electric Machinery Co. building where a cat has triggered havoc among the equipment. Happy rescues the animal, gets blasted by machinery, and is hauled off by a policeman — his inevitable fate. Frederick Burr Opper launched Happy Hooligan in 1900 for William Randolph Hearst's syndicate, and this full-color Sunday page shows Opper's confident, economical line: elastic figures, expressive silhouettes, and speech balloons that propel the action forward. These Hearst and Pulitzer Sunday pages of 1895–1910 are not precursors to the comic book — they *are* its grammar. Recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated text invented here fed directly into the first comic-book reprints of the 1930s.