Katzenjammer Kids — 1902-11-09

Six panels track Hans and Fritz — the incorrigible twin boys of Rudolph Dirks's long-running Sunday page — as the Captain spins a seafaring yarn at the dinner table, growing ever more theatrical, only to have the kids punctuate his climax with a slapstick bucket to the head. Speech balloons rendered in comic-German dialect fill each panel; the boys' stolid mother watches from her chair as chaos escalates on a precise left-to-right narrative arc. Dirks launched The Katzenjammer Kids in The New York Journal in 1897, adapting Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz into the recurring-character, multi-panel format that would directly define the Sunday supplement page — and, by anthology reprint, the comic book itself.