Happy Hooligan — Omaha Daily Bee, August 24, 1913

Twelve panels follow Happy Hooligan — the tin-canned tramp with an eternally good heart — as he misses a theatrical rehearsal, blunders through a riverside landscape with his dog, borrows an umbrella for an elopement scheme, and ends soaked, battered, and no better off than he started. Frederick Burr Opper launched Happy Hooligan in 1900 for William Randolph Hearst's syndicate, making it one of the longest-running early Sunday pages. Opper, already celebrated as a *Puck* political cartoonist, brought confident brushwork and a gift for escalating slapstick to each week's single broadsheet page. His consistent cast, numbered panels, and integrated speech balloons helped standardize the visual grammar that Sunday supplements — those color-printed, oversized pages — would hand directly to the first comic-book anthologists of the 1930s.