Happy Hooligan — Omaha Sunday Bee, February 1, 1914

Twelve panels follow Happy Hooligan's nephews as they spot a stray lamb, lure it with cake, tumble into a pond retrieving it via plank-and-wheelbarrow scheme, and arrive home soaking wet — only for Happy, roused from his nap, to be hauled off by a policeman in the final gag. Frederick Burr Opper's draftsmanship is loose and kinetic: exaggerated postures, crowded speech balloons, and a strip-long cause-and-effect chain that rewards panel-by-panel reading. Opper launched *Happy Hooligan* in 1900 for Hearst's syndicate, making the tin-canned tramp one of America's first recurring comic characters. Sunday pages like this one — full broadsheet, multi-row, printed in sequence — were the direct structural ancestor of the comic book, establishing the visual grammar of sequential art before the term existed.