Happy Hooligan — Omaha Daily Bee, January 19, 1913

This Sunday page pairs two strips. The upper tier, Jimmy — He's Still in Mexico, follows a sombrero-and-guitar romp through twelve panels of Mexican characters rendered with the exaggerated physiognomy standard to 1913 newspaper cartooning across the Hearst and Pulitzer syndicates. Below sits Happy Hooligan, Fred Opper's beloved tin-can-hatted tramp, here attending a masquerade ball and mistaken for a costumed nobleman — his courtly bow, the princess's delight, and the inevitable pratfall collapse telegraphed across six panels with crisp ink economy. Opper, who had honed visual comedy at Puck, used Hooligan from 1900 onward to refine the recurring-character strip, panel-to-panel continuity, and the speech balloon rhythm that would wire directly into the first comic books two decades later.