Signature of Frederick Burr Opper (1896)

What survives here is not a comic strip but Opper's own signature — a autograph reproduced in a biographical encyclopedia, the era's standard credential for men of public consequence. Frederick Burr Opper (1857–1937) had earned that page by 1896 as chief cartoonist at *Puck*, America's dominant humor weekly, before joining Hearst's *New York Journal* to create *Happy Hooligan*, *Alphonse and Gaston*, and *And Her Name Was Maud!* Those strips, running as Sunday pages from 1900 onward, helped fix the formal conventions — recurring cast, sequential panels, expressive speech balloons — that newspaper syndicates would bundle into the first comic books. The signature is the quiet proof of a reputation already made.