Happy Hooligan — St. Louis Republic, November 8, 1903

Nine panels across three tiers follow Happy Hooligan — the good-natured tramp in his tin-can hat — as he buys toys and balloons for his nephews, only to have the outing collapse into a brawl that lands him, as ever, in the cop's grip. Gloomy Gus and Flip appear in supporting roles, and the strip's visual rhythm is confident: uniform panel borders, speech balloons nested tightly into the action, and expressive crowd scenes carrying the slapstick forward without captions. Frederick Burr Opper launched Happy Hooligan for Hearst's papers in 1900, and by 1903 it was running in dozens of Sunday supplements nationwide. These full-color, multi-panel Sunday pages — alongside The Yellow Kid and Katzenjammer Kids — established the recurring cast, sequential panel grammar, and balloon-driven dialogue that American comic books would codify thirty years later.