Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, February 1, 1903

Six panels follow the tin-canned tramp Happy Hooligan through a street encounter: he tips his hat to a lady, is set upon by a mob, and is carted off by police — the eternal Hooligan loop of good intention and catastrophic consequence. His rotund brother Gloomy Gus watches from the margins. Frederick Burr Opper launched Happy Hooligan in 1900 for William Randolph Hearst's syndicate; by 1903 the strip ran in dozens of Sunday pages coast to coast. These color broadsheet pages — printed before the term 'comic book' existed — were the direct seedbed of the medium: recurring characters, sequential panels, speech balloons anchoring dialogue to figures, and visual pacing that readers learned to follow left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Opper, already a celebrated political cartoonist for Puck, brought draftsmanly economy to slapstick, and Happy Hooligan ran until 1932.