Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, May 3, 1903

Six panels follow Happy Hooligan — tin-can hat, ragged coat, spotted dog Flip at his heels — as he rescues a woman's runaway belongings, only to be collared by a policeman for his trouble. The gag is pure Opper: good intention punished, the bumbling innocent versus institutional authority, slapstick momentum building panel to panel. Frederick Burr Opper launched the strip in 1900 for William Randolph Hearst's syndicate, running it until 1932. Alongside *The Yellow Kid* and *Katzenjammer Kids*, these Hearst and Pulitzer Sunday pages — full-color, full-page, printed by the millions — established the visual grammar comics still use: sequential panels, speech balloons, recurring characters readers followed week to week. The Sunday supplement *was* the proto-comic book, decades before stapled pamphlets existed.