The Katzenjammer Kids Get Poor Old Father Into Trouble

Six panels follow Hans and Fritz as they lure a rotund adult figure behind a curtain with stolen cigarettes, then engineer a spectacular collapse of furniture and buckets that leaves him drenched and battered — the final panel delivers the strip's signature punchline of chaotic consequence. Rudolph Dirks launched The Katzenjammer Kids in The New York Journal in 1897, adapting Wilhelm Busch's German picture-story Max und Moritz. The strip's consistent cast, sequential numbered panels, and integrated speech balloons — visible here in the German-inflected dialect bubbles — established conventions that American newspaper comics would carry directly into the first comic books of the 1930s, which were simply reprinted Sunday pages repackaged between covers.