Artist with Happy Hooligan, 1922

This photograph captures an artist at work on *Happy Hooligan*, one of the era's most popular newspaper comic strips. Created by Frederick Opper in 1900, *Happy Hooligan* appeared in Sunday papers and dailies across America, establishing visual conventions that would define the medium: recurring characters, narrative sequences, and exaggerated expressions for comic effect. The strip's success demonstrated newspapers' appetite for serialized humor and helped establish comics as a distinct art form, laying groundwork for the comic book industry to follow.