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.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lively Comics of a Bygone Era,
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This review is from: Happy Hooligan (Forever Nuts: Classic Screwball Strips) (Hardcover)
If you're under 90, you've probably never heard of Happy Hooligan.
But his brother Gloomy Gus and his friends Alphonse and Gaston ("After you, my dear Alphonse") may ring a bell. Opper's bumbling hero may have faded from popular memory, but his side characters seem to be with us to stay. Happy Hooligan is a hobo who is so poor he wears a tin can for a hat. Nonetheless, he is always ready to help anyone he sees, by chasing after a runaway hat, apprehending a suspected thief, or carrying a bulky object. Unfortunately, his attempts to help always end in disaster, and if Happy puts a large object over his shoulder in the second panel, he will surely turn and whack someone in the head with it by the fourth. Most of the strips end in Happy being beaten with nightsticks or dragged off to jail by the police, always in a humorous way, of course. Opper worked this simple formula for decades, but he mixed it up a lot. Happy has a large family, including the aforementioned Gloomy Gus, his rich-guy hobo brother Montmorency (who speaks with a British accent), and three nephews who adore him. He travels to Europe (after numerous failed attempts), visits a duke, joins the circus, and falls in love. Yet almost every strip has the same progression: Happy tries to help; Happy whacks someone on the head; Happy is hauled off to jail. Because of this repetition, this book is better dipped into than read cover to cover. Still, there is a lot to enjoy: Opper's characters are lively, his drawing style is interesting, and the strips provide a glimpse into another era. (It should be noted that the era includes some portrayals of black and Italian characters that may strike the modern reader as offensive, although they are not malicious.) Happy himself is a likeable character, kind to children and animals and always willing to try something new. Opper also likes to break things up with side conversations, which are often quite funny. This horizontal-format book includes 90 strips, most of them six panels long, dating from 1906 to 1913. They look old, not just because they are stylized but because of the image quality; although the strips are quite readable, some are marred with stains or folds. The strips were taken from actual newspapers, not the original art; according to a note in the back, most came from a private collection of newspapers that was rescued from the trash by a collector. Other pundits, notably author Nicholson Baker, have cautioned that the advent of microfilm has led libraries to discard their paper copies of newspapers, which means that many comic strips from this golden age will be lost forever. From that point of view, the NBM edition is an important document. The introduction, by Allan Holtz, gives biographical information on Opper and puts his work into its historical context. While there are a few bloopers in the introduction and one strip is incorrectly cropped, this is a very nice, well-designed package and an excellent setting for these lively comics of a bygone era. -- Brigid Alverson
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
From Happy Hooligan to Eek the Cat,
By Gord Wilson "alivingdog.com" (Bellingham, WA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE)
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This review is from: Happy Hooligan (Forever Nuts: Classic Screwball Strips) (Hardcover)
"It never hurts to help", as fans know, is one of the many mottos of the good-hearted purple feline, Eek the Cat. But as Savage Steve Holland, the Fox cartoon's inventive creator has noted, the moral often ends up more like "no good deed goes unpunished". For the millions of fans waiting for the DVD adventures of Eek and Sharky, that underlying whimsical/ noir/ existential or whatever it is undercurrent is part of what makes this cartoon so rabidly popular. And, as Savage Steve, no stranger to his comic lineage, would be the first to admit, you can trace that motto, style, and elan back a century ago to Eek's slapstick ancestor, an Irish tramp who was the darling of the golden age of newspaper comics, one Happy Hooligan.
This strip, and the two dozen others Frederick Burr Opper worked on marked a turning point in the late 1800s newspaper comic. With a few notable exceptions, B.O. (before Opper), cartoons, as newspaper comics were called, were stiff and pointed, and as unfunny as some of the editorial cartoons of today. The other success that transformed comics was Outcault's The Yellow Kid, combining masterful composition and "vulgar", violent, everyday scenes in "Hogan's Alley", which is nothing less than a celebration, as is "Happy Hooligan" of the life of immigrants and lower class citizens. Then, as now, most of the rest of the paper focussed on celebrity and the rich and famous. Happy is significant for another reason as well. Earlier comics, particularly from Germany, where the comics were already long established, tended to be violent, but almost sadistic, sometimes rationalizing the violence with a moral. Compare, for instance, Max and Moritz, the original inspiration for what would appear in American comics as both "The Captain and the Kids" and "The Katzenjammers", the dual names the result of a long, protracted battle between newspapers over the new, hot media of the funny papers. Happy, we are happy to report, is firmly in the slapstick camp. Opper's comics are not sanitized; neither are they sadistic. They are, instead, purely in the vein of the best American humor, which is largely immigrant humor of a unique kind that formed the strong, historical tradition of humor for comics and cartoons in America. This 110 page color, coffee table hardback presents Opper's original strips in their pristine glory, not easy to do 100 years after the fact. Alan Holtz's 13 page introduction establishes the strips in their millieu at the turn of the century. What follows is about 80 pages of full color and two color strips (which is how they often appeared in the comic supplements) sampling Opper's output from 1902 through 1913. These include the zany, inspired high point from 1905, when Happy and friends visit London, resulting in a royal riot and even more trouble than in the colonies. There is only one example in the intro. of Opper's other wildly popular strip, "Alphonse and Gaston", to which the collection, One Hundred Years of Comic Strips, to name a representative volume, devotes five pages, and this book will send many readers in search of those strips. In The Comics: Before 1945, Brian Walker calls Opper "The Dean of American Cartoonists", noting the popularity of Opper's strip from the '20s about an uncooperative mule, "And Her Name Was Maud". As Bill Watterson noted in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, the comic strips of the last century occupied prominent positions in the daily news, with Sunday comic supplements of the funny papers drenched in color, large, lavish panels lovingly drawn by the best artists of the day, with Hearst, Pulitzer and other publishers sending out scouts and competing for cartoonists as avidly as sports recruiters today. As Happy Hooligan and other comics of that bygone era have inspired countless cartoonists and comics artists in the ensuing decades, so this volume cannot fail to work that same magic today.
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