Happy Hooligan — Omaha Sunday Bee, June 1, 1913

Twelve numbered panels follow Happy Hooligan — the good-natured tramp in his signature tin-can hat — as he attempts to sic a trained bear on a pompous Duke, only to have the bear turn on him instead. Punched, bitten, and chased through snowy streets, Happy nonetheless rescues the Duke from a worse fate, finally winning reluctant permission to marry Suzanne. The strip runs under the header Comic Section of the Omaha Sunday Bee, Part IV, with a decorative character frieze along the bottom. Frederick Opper launched Happy Hooligan in 1900 for Hearst's syndicate, making it one of the earliest recurring comic characters in American newspapers — those Sunday color pages where Opper, Outcault, and McManus were forging the visual grammar of sequential art: the fixed recurring character, numbered panels, and speech balloons that would migrate directly into comic books two decades later.