Haven’t heard of Happy Hooligan? Join the club! Resurrecting “classic screwball strips” is the mission of the Forever Nuts line of NBM Publishing, and Frederick Burr Opper’s HAPPY HOOLIGAN is the slapstick-heavy second in a series.

Today, you probably couldn’t get away with having a hobo as the star of your comic strip, but it worked for Opper — in a big way — in 1900. Although the writer and artist had about 15 various strips in the first 32 years of that century, only the one featuring Happy Hooligan lasted that whole time.

Happy has a good heart, but he always screws up in each strip — at one time with the tongue-twisting title of The Doings of Happy Hooligan and His Brother, Gloomy Gus — usually getting arrested. An alarming number of the 90 or so strips here deal with hat retrieval.

One thing that sticks out is, of course, the racist images of the period. For instance, there’s a black woman drawn in a cartoony, Aunt Jemima-style who’s selling “Hot cawn!” on the sidewalk. These instances, however, are few, and I believe done without real malice.

You’re more likely to be distracted, anyway, by a remarkable skill Opper has in comic storytelling. Often, there are two things going on at the same time, and by the end of a mere six panels, they converge. At a time when comic strips were in their infancy, that’s a remarkable talent. —Rod Lott

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