Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, April 12, 1903

Frederick Burr Opper's Happy Hooligan runs across the top half of this Sunday page in eight panels: Happy's dog Flip knocks a top hat into the air, triggering a chain of chases, collisions, and courtroom threats that leaves everyone hatless and indignant. Below it, the page fills with smaller single-panel gag cartoons in the dense, illustrated-humor tradition Opper carried from Puck magazine. Happy himself — tin-can hat, round nose, perpetual bad luck — was among the first recurring comic strip characters with a consistent visual personality across weekly installments. Opper's fluid brushwork and confident speech balloons were standard-setting: this page appeared when Sunday newspaper comics, syndicated nationally and printed in color, were actively inventing the grammar — panels, sequential action, character continuity — that the comic book would later inherit wholesale.