From the exhibition
Happy Hooligan — Omaha Daily Bee, March 2, 1913
· March 2, 1913

Two strips share this Sunday page. *Montmorency Undertakes a Mission* sends a top-hatted dandy on a courting errand for his brother 'Happy Hooligan,' moving through six panels of drawing-room rejection and physical slapstick — a woman hurls him bodily out the door, a final child delivers the verdict: 'He said no.' Below, *Mr. Batch Meets a Fine Child* follows a bald, long-nosed gentleman undone by a monstrous small boy in a boxing ring. Both strips use the period's stock broad caricature, including grotesquely exaggerated facial features on minor characters that reflect the casual ethnic and class mockery common to American newspaper comics of the era. The page illustrates the Sunday supplement format — full-page, multi-strip, slapstick-driven — that Hearst and Pulitzer popularized from the 1890s onward, establishing the recurring character, the sequential panel, and the speech balloon as the foundational grammar that comic books would directly inherit two decades later.
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