Hopkins worked for the Daily Graphic, New York's first illustrated newspaper. He worked for Joseph Keppler and Puck Magazine before joining James Wales when he decided to start The Judge in 1881. He moved to Australia where he worked for the Sydney Bulletin and established himself as the country's leading cartoonist. David Low also worked on the newspaper: "The Bulletin was radical, rampant and free, with an anti-English bias and a preference for a republican form of government. No more imported governors nor doggerel national anthems, no more pompous borrowed generals, foreign titles, foreign capitalists, cheap labour, diseased immigrants, if The Bulletin could help it."