Happy Reviews for Happy Hooligan
Happy Hooligan’s been getting some great press out there right before Christmas:
Andrew “Capt. Comics” Smith for the nationally syndicated Scripps News:
“Happy Hooligan” was one of the most successful comic strips in the golden age of that medium, starring a happy-go-lucky bumbler with a tin can for a hat. Frederick Burr Opper, dubbed “the Dean of Cartoonists” at the apex of the Yellow Journalism era, also created “Alphonse and Gaston” and several other memorable strips, but it was “Happy Hooligan” (1900-1932) for the Hearst newspapers that was his high mark. In “Hooligan” he formalized the visual “language” of comic strips, abandoning text blocks completely for word balloons, and throwing his stories into ever-faster forward motion. Which makes the “Forever Nuts Vol. 2: Happy Hooligan” collection ($24.95, NBM) required reading for anyone who takes comic strips as seriously as they deserve — and likes to laugh, too.
Related: The first volume in the Forever Nuts series, “The Early Years of Mutt & Jeff.” Also serious fun.
From The Onion’s site:
“Following last year’s stellar collection The Early Years Of Mutt & Jeff, NBM’s “classic screwball strips” series Forever Nuts returns with a well-chosen anthology of Frederick Burr Opper’s early-20th-century newspaper comic Happy Hooligan.
The joy of the strip is in the way Opper sets up his dominoes before knocking them down. Opper delighted in filling the frame with as many figures and objects as he could, and then figuring out how to put them all to good use… B+”
“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
