Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, November 29, 1903

Eight panels follow the tin-can-hatted tramp Happy Hooligan as he spots a man threatening to jump from a bridge, wrestles him back, tumbles into the river himself, and is fished out by a police launch — only to be arrested for jumping off a dock. Fred Opper's strip, syndicated by Hearst from 1900, built its running joke on Hooligan's compulsive good deeds rewarded with punishment. The art is clean ink line, figures broad and rubbery, speech balloons firmly anchored to their speakers — visual grammar Opper helped standardize across American Sunday pages. Those pages, printed in color rotogravure and folded into sections, were the direct material ancestor of the comic book: same page size, same panel grid, same recurring cast readers collected week after week.