Happy Hooligan — Omaha Sunday Bee, May 4, 1913

Twelve panels follow Happy Hooligan — his tin-can hat and checkered suit instantly recognizable — through a riverside rescue gone wrong. He spots a woman threatening to jump, dives in to save her, and gets hauled before a judge at the strip's end, penniless despite a promised thousand-dollar reward. Frederick Opper's linework is loose and kinetic: exaggerated poses, stacked speech balloons, and tight sequential logic drive every gag. Opper launched Happy Hooligan in 1900 for Hearst's syndicate, making it one of the earliest strips with a continuous protagonist. Sunday pages like this one — full-color broadsheets broken into numbered panels — were the direct structural ancestor of the comic book, establishing the visual grammar that Opper, Outcault, and McManus were quietly standardizing panel by panel.