From the exhibition
Happy Hooligan — Omaha Daily Bee, January 19, 1913
· January 19, 1913

This Sunday page pairs two strips. The upper tier, *Jimmy — He's Still in Mexico*, follows a sombrero-and-guitar romp through twelve panels of Mexican characters rendered with the exaggerated physiognomy standard to 1913 newspaper cartooning across the Hearst and Pulitzer syndicates. Below sits *Happy Hooligan*, Fred Opper's beloved tin-can-hatted tramp, here attending a masquerade ball and mistaken for a costumed nobleman — his courtly bow, the princess's delight, and the inevitable pratfall collapse telegraphed across six panels with crisp ink economy. Opper, who had honed visual comedy at *Puck*, used Hooligan from 1900 onward to refine the recurring-character strip, panel-to-panel continuity, and the speech balloon rhythm that would wire directly into the first comic books two decades later.
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