Happy Hooligan

by Frederick Burr Opper, Allan Holtz (Introduction), Jeffrey Lindenblatt (Editor)

Opper was already a quite successful cartoonist/illustrator for the prestigious Puck magazine when William Randolph Hearst lured him out to create a comic strip for the New York Journal. While a step down from (relatively) high to low brow, Opper jumped at the chance and out came “Happy Hooligan” an un-heroized vagrant who ends up very badly at the end of each strip, no matter how much good he might mean. His perennial demise surely went on to inspire Wile E. Coyote or Mr. O, especially as his own cowardice and unworthiness contributes to his hilarious woes. This second entry in ‘Forever Nuts’ presents a collection of the better early full color Sundays.

Genres: Comics

110 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2008

About the author

Frederick Burr Opper is regarded as one of the pioneers of American newspaper comic strips, best known for his comic strip Happy Hooligan. His comic characters were featured in magazine gag cartoons, covers, political cartoons and comic strips for six decades.

Reviews

[Michael]

There's something peculiar about pre-1910 comic strips. The punchline is always the same, but the adventure and joke seems to be in the process of getting to the punchline. In Happy Hooligan, our titular character is a well-meaning buffoon whose attempts to help children and the elderly always result in massive carnage, leading inevitably to Happy's arrest - while his brother Gloomy Gus stands in the background prognosticating something bad about to happen. After a little while, a third brother is introduced, to share in Happy's destruction and jailtime (occasionally with Gus being imprisoned as well), and they do some world travelling - with an extended sequence about trying to meet the king of England - so causing international incidents as they go. It's repetitive and not very fun to read.

Still, I must give credit to NBM's production work on this book. It's solidly bound; the colors are inconsistent, giving it an authentic old-time newspaper feel; and though it could be larger to show off the detail in Opper's artwork, it's large enough to accommodate the art without being overwhelming to carry or page through. Happy Hooligan is valuable as a historical artifact more so than as a readable comic strip, and NBM managed to present it in a good format. So bravo to them for that.

[Rick Saunders]

Fun read for the art work, language, and cultural history but 100+ pages of the same gag is a bit much.

[Alex Fyffe]

2.5

[Isidore]

Every week, for more than thirty years, Opper's Hooligan proved the truth of the adage that 'no good deed goes unpunished'. He lives in a world where virtue will not only not be rewarded, it will result in a beating by the police and outrageous jail sentences ("The court will be lenient--forty years at hard labor."). This irony and cynicism, and Opper's unerring pen, should please even jaded modern readers, and those of a more scholarly bent will want to see what this historically important strip was all about. Yes, the strip is repetitive, but so were Laurel and Hardy, and the intentional predictability of the gags is part of the fun.

[Michael P.]

There are a couple of Shakespeare references, but mostly this is a strip that, like nearly every comic strip of its era, has one basic joke: Happy gets into trouble by trying to help someone. There are endless variations on this and a few strips collected here show somebody else getting into trouble, but putting these comics into a book does them both a service and a disservice. The service is to make the strips available at all. The disservice is that the repetition of reading them consecutively, instead with in the Sunday funnies with six days between readings to make the one gag seem fresher, has the result of making these strips very, very tedious.