Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, October 19, 1902

Six panels across two tiers follow Happy Hooligan and his brother Gloomy Gus as they blunder into two German gentlemen on a city street. Happy's signature tin-can hat and battered coat mark him instantly; chaos escalates from a muddy puddle to an explosion, a brawl, and Happy hauled before a judge — ending, inevitably, with him jailed while muttering he only wanted a smoke. Frederick Burr Opper's linework is economical and kinetic, his speech balloons integrated naturally into the action. Opper launched Happy in 1900 for the Hearst syndicate, making the strip one of the first nationally distributed Sunday-page features with a fixed cast and serialized comic logic — the very scaffold on which the comic book format, assembled from reprinted newspaper pages, would be built within three decades.