Happy Hooligan — Omaha Daily Bee, April 27, 1913

Two complete Sunday strips fill this page. 'Happy Hooligan Makes Progress (Backwards)' runs six panels: Happy, the tin-canned tramp, tries to buy peanuts for a zoo elephant, gets chased and battered for his trouble, and ends groveling — the joke cycling back to zero, as Hooligan gags always do. Below it, 'Mr. Batch Visits!' follows two stout bachelors on a sofa-bound social call that devolves into a kissing-sound punchline. Fred Opper's cross-hatched, rubbery figures and his confident balloon placement show the visual grammar of newspaper comics fully formed. Opper launched Hooligan in 1900 for Hearst's syndicate; the strip ran until 1932, its recurring lovable-loser premise directly schooling the serialized character strips that would fill the first comic book reprints of the 1930s.