Happy Hooligan — Omaha Sunday Bee, November 2, 1913

"Ring Out, Ye Wedding Bells!" spreads across twelve panels plus a decorative footer strip, following the tin-canned tramp Happy Hooligan as he misses his own wedding — waiting on a park bench while chaos erupts around him. A runaway horse, a pile-on brawl, and a furious bride named Suzanne drive the slapstick. Frederick Burr Opper launched Hooligan in 1900 for Hearst's syndicate, making him one of the first recurring characters built entirely around Sunday color pages. Those pages — printed broadsheet, sold with the weekend paper — were the direct ancestors of the comic book: same panel grids, same speech balloons, same cliff-hanger rhythm that anthology reprint publishers would package into stapled pamphlets by the mid-1930s. Opper's loose brushwork and crowd staging show the visual grammar already fully formed.