Happy Hooligan — Omaha Daily Bee, July 12, 1914

Frederick Burr Opper's Happy Hooligan ran in Hearst papers from 1900 to 1932, making its tin-canned protagonist one of the longest-lived characters in American comics. This Sunday page follows the good-natured tramp as he accompanies the Duke of Chumley into what the title caption calls "the Best English Society" — a Royal Zoo outing that cascades through twelve panels: Hooligan attempts to feed the animals, gets kicked by an ostrich, is hauled before an "Appellate Court," and ends the strip being dressed in the Duke's evening suit, still comically oversized. Opper's line is economical and kinetic, his speech balloons naturalistically shaped to the speaker. Sunday pages like this one — full-color broadsheet grids sold as syndicated supplements — supplied the direct template for the first collected comic books of the 1930s, which were simply reprinted newspaper strips stapled between covers.