Quick One #2


by

Tuesday, October 20, 2009


My hero.

Oh, this a good one. NBM, as part of its Forever Nuts series of reprints (by the way, I like how NBM has carved out a niche doing books like this that are not obvious but have immense scholarly value — the early Bringing Up Father being another wonderful project) recently released Happy Hooligan, which collects a bunch of Opper’s comic strip from 1902-1913. This is stupid art at its best.
Opper was 42 when invented Happy, and unlike a lot of his comic strip peers, an accomplished illustrator. But he seemed taken with grungy new medium and designed a comic strip that is literally knock-kneed and hobbled — a real roustabout — to fit into the century. Nothing so graceful as Nemo for Opper. Nope, it is rough drawing and tumbling antics all the way. Opper seems to have intuited that a handful of wonky lines could add up to a character and that character business and action was the best thing going for mass appeal. But coming to it mature, the man knew how to delineate form, no matter how simply: Each figure is distinctly distressed.

As a storyteller Opper’s gaze never wavers. It’s always that head-on, unmoving view of the action. Poor, good-hearted Happy Hooligan — he gets jobs, tries to help people, attempts transactions, but all for naught. Or at least, all for just our entertainment. He stumbles, falls, and breaks, but never badly. Like a stilted ragdoll, HH always comes back.

The book itself is good. I’m grateful to have a color collection of these strips, even if I’m not always clear on why these particular strips were chosen for publication. The supplementary essays do add up to a solid portrait of the man and where the strip fits in comics history, and include a truly bizarre 1934 photo of Opper and Alex Raymond; the older man was lauding this new young star. Two more different approaches to comics could hardly be found.

The best part is just how entertaining these strips are. They feel contemporary in that Opper went for both nonsense and physical (and often both simultaneously!) gags. In their static staging and reliance on full figured action, some of these strips remind me of Gary Panter’s recent work. Plus, HH is just such an odd looking character with his round head and soup can hat. I mean, just look at some of the non-Opper merch this strip inspired. It couldn’t be any more bad/good if King Terry himself designed it.


Needless to say, I’m starting a HH fanclub. Who’s with me?

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5 Responses to “Quick One #2”
  1. Paul Karasik says:

    Get in line, Dan, I am already President of that club and Newgarden is Treasurer.

  2. Rob Clough says:

    I reviewed both Bringing Up Father and Happy Hooligan here:

    http://tinyurl.com/r2b47g

    The amazing thing about HH is that Opper was 40 years old when he started it! He was already one of the top cartoonists in the world (providing the bulk of the material in Puck) before starting on a remarkable second act.

    Reading HH should be mandatory for all gag cartoonists and humorists. Every later master was clearly influenced by it.

  3. Marc Deckter says:

    Thanks for the heads up, Dan. Now all we need is an "Alphonse and Gaston" collection and I'll be all set.

  4. sdestefano says:

    Even if I were pumped full of cartoon-steroids, on my best day I'd never draw half as well as Opper did at the end of his (and Happy's) career.
    Move over boys, I'm so into this, I'll be the fuckin' HH Fanclub janitor.

  5. Bruce says:

    I grew up in Madison, Ohio, which boasted of itself (on townline road markers) as "The Birthplace of Fredrick Opper, Creator of Happy Hooligan." Madison had Opper and a road in and a road out and about 6000 people.
    Northeast Ohio is pretty good for cartoonists, with the creators of Yellow Kid, Ziggy, Zits…and Superman…among others.

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