Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, February 8, 1903

Nine panels trace a Valentine's Day scheme: the Katzenjammer Kids plant cruel cards on Happy Hooligan, the tin-can-hatted, perpetually hapless tramp, who blunders through a gauntlet of affronted recipients before the gag collapses on him in the final tier. Frederick Burr Opper's line is loose and kinetic — rubbery figures, crowded speech balloons, slapstick motion conveyed through posture alone. Happy Hooligan, launched in 1900 in the Hearst papers, was among the first strips built around a single recurring character, episode after episode, training readers in the serialized visual logic that would migrate, three decades later, into the first comic books. These Sunday color pages — syndicated, reprinted, collected in early paperback anthologies — are the direct ancestors of the medium.